International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies, 7(2), 1-24, April-June 2011 1 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Cognitive Fit Theory, Domain Ontology, Ontology Creation Methodology, Ontology Evaluation, Semantic Web, World Wide Web 1. INTRODUCTION The World Wide Web is a massively distributed reservoir of information, but the information does not have well-defined machine-under- standable meaning attached to it, prohibiting automated manipulation and reasoning about such information (Ram & Zhao, 2007). The next generation of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, is intended to enable more intelligent use of data and information for effective electronic interoperability and collaboration (Horrocks, 2008). A successful Semantic Web, however, depends upon the ability to manage, integrate, Construction of Domain Ontologies: Sourcing the World Wide Web Jongwoo Kim, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Veda C. Storey, Georgia State University, USA ABSTRACT As the World Wide Web evolves into the Semantic Web, domain ontologies, which represent the concepts of an application domain and their associated relationships, have become increasingly important as surrogates for capturing and representing the semantics of real world applications. Much ontology development remains manual and is both diffcult and time-consuming. This research presents a methodology for semi-automatically generating domain ontologies from extracted information on the World Wide Web. The methodology is imple- mented in a prototype that integrates existing ontology and web organization tools. The prototype is used to develop ontologies for different application domains, and an empirical analysis carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of the research. and analyze data and is driven by the role of semantics for automated approaches to exploit- ing Web resources (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001). Ontologies, which are at the heart of the Semantic Web, define the concepts and relationships that make global interoperabil- ity possible, facilitate sharing and integration (Horrocks, 2008; Leukel & Sugumaran, 2009; Tun & Tojo, 2008) and serve as surrogates for semantics. Ontologies are also useful for digital libraries and personalized information manage- ment (Katifori, Halatsis, Lepouras, Vassilakis, & Giannopoulou, 2007; Meng & Chatwin, 2010). Although their need is well-documented, ontol- ogy development is often performed manually and is challenging and time-consuming (Ding DOI: 10.4018/jiit.2011040101