Bootstrapping semantics on the web: meaning elicitation from schemas

In most web sites, web-based applications (such as web portals, e- marketplaces, search engines), and in the file systems of personal computers, a wide variety of schemas (such as taxonomies, direc- tory trees, thesauri, Entity-Relationship schemas, RDF Schemas) are published which (i) convey a clear meaning to humans (e.g. help in the navigation of large collections of documents), but (ii) convey only a small fraction (if any) of their meaning to machines, as their intended meaning is not formally/explicitly represented. In this paper we present a general methodology for automatically elic- iting and representing the intended meaning of these structures, and for making this meaning available in domains like information in- tegration and interoperability, web service discovery and composi- tion, peer-to-peer knowledge management, and semantic browsers. We also present an implementation (called CTXMATCH2) of how such a method can be used for semantic interoperability.