Introduction
The objective of this paper is to offer information retrieval using Computational knowledge in Wikipedia. The paper employs the articles of Wu and Weld (2008) “Automatically Refining the Wikipedia Infobox Ontology” and article of Syed, Finin and Joshi (2007) “Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents” in providing better knowledge for Wikipedia as information retrieval.
Main body
Wu and Weld (2008) in their paper “Automatically Refining the Wikipedia Infobox Ontology” provide argument on the Semantic Web where the realization of the Semantic web involves the extraction of the large volume of data from the web. Typically, the Semantic web approaches involve extraction of information from the web with the use of artificial exactor. The author argues that Wikipedia is an example of website which involves logical extraction numerous articles. These features of Wikipedia have led to the creation of the concept known as Infobox. Typically, the essential features of Infobox are its ability employ Wikipedia to generate addition structure data. Thus, the paper pointed out that Ontology Generator is the process of combining the WordNet with Wikipedia. From the authors’ perspectives, a major advantage on ontology is the ability extract structured data from the raw text of Wikipedia. However, the authors pointed to the main set of Wikipedia as error prone because of the ability to edit the articles provided in the website of Wikipedia. In addition, Wikipedia infobox is an example of Schemata where the data obtained through Schemata are generally noise, and needs a lot of cleaning before organising to ontology.
Syed, Finin and Joshi (2007) on the other hand present Wikipedia as online encyclopaedia that is freely available to the users. Typically, the Wikipedia is growing in content daily because of the ability to edit the content already available as well as ability to add new content to the database of Wikipedia. Thus, with the level of the articles and research papers available in the Wikipedia, the volume of Wikipedia has reached million of articles and this articles have been translated into various languages such as French, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, English and German. The collection of Wikipedia consists of XML collections where several articles inter linked together.
Meanwhile, the author went further by describing the use of document in the statistical techniques, which has become the basis of information retrieval and the practical success of information retrieval is the ability to tag document with represent semantic concepts. Typically, the ontology has emerged from the tag that has been employed by the users, which is linked to semantic concepts. It should be noted that the ontology has the advantages of being linked to semantic concepts by employing sophisticated language to understand the systems such as specialized knowledge. For example Power set and OntoSem. Despite the advantages of ontology stipulated, the concept of ontology is also beset with disadvantages because of its designing, and implementing process which is beset with difficulties. For example, the ACM is undergoing restructuring because of the classification of computer science concepts that are being used to search articles in the database are becoming out of date, and there is need for the reorganisation of the concept order to search relevant document. Typically, the disadvantages posed from the ontology angle needs to be addressed because ontology “represents a consensus view of a community of users and is constructed and maintained by the community without cost to any organization”. (p 2). Meanwhile, ontology needs to be structurally organized. Meanwhile, the authors argued that there are attributes of Wikipedia which can be used as ontology. For example, the pages in Wikipedia that contain administrative part can be used for the term ontology such as describing individual locations, and categories. Essentially, there are many advantages of employing Wikipedia as ontology. For instance, Wikipedia is comprehensive and can maintain ten thousands users at a time. Moreover, the Wikipedia is free and offer free sources for the users.
Despite the argument of the two literatures that Wikipedia can be used for ontology, there is shortcoming in these two literatures. Although Wu and Weld (2008) have been able to point out that Wikipedia is error prone. However, the Wikipedia has not been accepted on the academic communities. The research team in the academic circles believes that the links and the articles in the Wikipedia can not be accepted as the authentic sources for the body of research. Moreover, the ability where Wikipedia offer itself for editing and contribution of different sorts of articles without proper scrutiny have diminished the quality of the Wikipedia as effective ontology. Meanwhile, this paper argues that Wikipedia cannot be fully be presented as authentic ontology.
Conclusion
This paper has revealed that ontology is branch of information science that deals with aspect of information retrieval. The paper reveals on how the literatures reviewed attempted to present the concept of ontology with relation to the Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia may consist of several documents topics which have been linked to different articles. However, this paper argues that Wikipedia has not yet been fully recognized for the source of academic documents that can be used for research purpose in the academic communities.
Reference List
Syed, Z.S. Finin, T. & Joshi, A. (2007) “Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents”, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Wu, F.& Weld, D.S. (2008). “Automatically Refining the Wikipedia Infobox Ontology,” ACM, 635-644.