OntoKhoj: a semantic web portal for ontology searching, ranking and classification

The goal of the next generation Web is to build virtual communities, wherein software agents and people can work in cooperation by sharing knowledge. To achieve this goal, the emerging Semantic Web community has proposed ontologies to express knowledge in a machine understandable way. The process of building and maintaining ontologies, which is known as Ontology Engineering, presents unique challenges. These challenges are related to lack of trustworthy and authoritative knowledge sources and absence of a centralized repository to locate ontologies to be reused. In this paper, we propose a Semantic Web portal, called OntoKhoj that is designed to simplify the Ontology Engineering process. The methodology in developing OntoKhoj is based on algorithms used for searching, aggregating, ranking and classifying ontologies in Semantic Web. The proposed OntoKhoj would 1) allow agents and ontology engineers to retrieve trustworthy, authoritative knowledge, and 2) expedite the process of ontology engineering through extensive reuse of ontologies. We have implemented the OntoKhoj portal and further validated our system on the real ontological data in the Semantic Web.