Description
The Internet holds huge amount of documents available for users. Effective utilization of this enormous repository means a need for systems supporting users in a process of finding related documents. An ontology defined in the framework of the Semantic Web (Berners, 2001) allows for specification of concepts, their instances, and relationships existing between concepts. A hierarchy of concepts (Yager, 2000) is a graph-like structure providing a means for representing human-like dependencies. The article proposes an approach for utilization of a hierarchy of concepts to perform categorization of web pages in the Semantic Web. A user provides a hierarchy that can only partially “cover” their domain of interest. The hierarchy is treated as a “seed” representing user’s initial knowledge about the domain. Ontologies are treated as supplementary knowledge bases. They are used to instantiate the hierarchy with concrete information, as well as to enhance it with new concepts initially unknown to a user.