Research on OWL-based construction, merging, mapping and evolution of ontology in aviation product domain

From the current theories of Semantic Web and Ontology, this paper aims at exploring one way to construct, merge, map and evolve ontology in aviation product domain. Driven by its application background, the domain ontology is designed and built to support the "Auto-Mining System for Aviation Products". It merged with a Loom-based "military aircraft ontology" from USA via translating the used one from Loom to OWL. Also by referring to NASA Thesaurus, a comprehensive concept hierarchy is mapped into the domain ontology. Based on these, Protege is used to visually implement a prototype for this domain ontology. Finally, evolution is completed by auto-extraction of instances from large amount of documents in this domain.