A Semantic Approach for Classification of Web Ontologies Muhammad Fahad 1 , Nejib Moalla 1 , Abdelaziz Bouras 1 ( 1 University of Lumière Lyon2, Bron, France CERRAL/LIESP, IUT Lumière, firstname.lastname@univ-lyon2.fr) Muhammad Abdul Qadir 2 , Muhammad Farukh 1 ( 2 Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan aqadir@jinnah.edu.pk, mhd.farukh@gmail.com) Abstract: Semantic web provides virtual communities that enable intelligent interaction between software agents and people due to availability of standard open ontologies. But, as the semantic web is gaining much popularity, there is a massive growth seen in the ontology development which poses new research challenges such as ontology classification, ranking, searching, retrieval, etc. This results many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch, that facilitate user for such tasks. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use traditional classification algorithms of plain text for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer with many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define ontology classification problem and categorized it into many sub-problems. We present a new methodology for ontology classification that is based on ontology approach for ontology classification and retrieval. The proposed framework, ONTCLASSIFIRE, benefit construction, maintenance or expansion of ontologies directories on the semantic web, and helps in ontology management and retrieval for software agents and people. We conclude that the use of context specific knowledge hidden in ontologies gives more accurate results of ontology classification and retrieval. Keywords: Ontology classification and retrieval, Semantic matching and searching, Web page Classification, Semantic web portals Categories: H.3.2, H.3.3, H.3.7, M.3, M.7 1 Introduction Semantic web provides virtual communities that enable knowledge extraction and usage to software agents and people for knowledge sharing [Patel, 03]. It uses the notion of ontologies for the conceptualization and elicitation of the domain knowledge, and stores knowledge in terms of concepts and properties in a machine understandable and processable manner. Due to their capacities of decidability and expressiveness, ontologies have played a fundamental role for describing semantics of data not only in the emerging semantic web but also in traditional knowledge engineering, and act as a backbone in knowledge-base and semantic-based information processing systems. Information storage, processing, retrieval, decision Proceedings of I-KNOW 2010 1-3 September 2010, Graz, Austria 69