Improving Semantic Awareness of Knowledge-based Applications through Structural Disambiguation ⋆ Federica Mandreoli 1 , Riccardo Martoglia 1 , and Enrico Ronchetti 1 Universit`a di Modena e Reggio Emilia Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione 41100 Modena, Italy {fmandreoli,rmartoglia,eronchetti}@unimo.it Abstract. In this paper, we summarize the features of the versatile dis- ambiguation approach we recentlty presented in [1]. Its main aim is to make explicit the meaning of structure-based information such as XML schemas, XML document structures, web directories, and ontologies. It can be of support to the semantic-awareness of a wide range of applica- tions, from schema matching and query rewriting to peer data manage- ment systems, from XML data clustering to ontology-based automatic annotation of web pages and query expansion. The effectiveness of the achieved results has been experimentally proved and is founded both on a flexible exploitation of the structure context, whose extraction can be tailored on the specific application needs, and of the information pro- vided by commonly available thesauri such as WordNet. This work is partially supported by the Italian Council co-funded project WISDOM. 1 Introduction In recent years, knowledge-based approaches, i.e. approaches which exploit the semantics of the information they access, are rapidly acquiring more and more importance in a wide range of application contexts. We refer to “hot” research topics, like schema matching and query rewriting [2], also in peer data man- agement systems (PDMS) [3], XML data clustering and classification [4, 5] and ontology-based annotation of web pages and query expansion [6], all going in the direction of the Semantic Web [7]. In these contexts, most of the proposed ap- proaches share a common basis: They focus on the structural properties of the accessed information, which are represented adopting XML or ontology-based data models, and their effectiveness is heavily dependent on knowing the right meaning of the employed terminology. Generally speaking, due to the ambiguity of natural languages, terms describing information usually have several mean- ings and making explicit the semantics of information goes through the tricky task of deriving from the context the most appropriate meanings. Fig. 1 shows the hierarchical representation of a portion of the categories offered by eBay, ⋆ An extended version of this paper has been presented at ACM CIKM’05 [1]