In: Diploma Thesis, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, 2006, pp. 1-65.
Ontology learning is one of the essential topics in the scope of an important area of current computer science and artificial intelligence - the upcoming Semantic Web. As the Semantic Web idea comprises semantically annotated descendant of the current world wide web and related tools and resources, the need of vast and reliable knowledge repositories is obvious. Ontologies present well defined, straightforward and standardised form of these repositories. There are many possible utilisations of ontologies - from automatic annotation of web resources to domain representation and reasoning tasks. However, the ontology creation process is very expensive, time-consuming and unobjective when performed manually. So a framework for automatic acquisition of ontologies would be very advantageous. In this work we present such a framework called OLE (an acronym for Ontology LEarning) and current results of its application. The main relevant topics, state of the art methods and techniques related to ontology acquisition are discussed as a part of theoretical background for the presentation of the OLE framework and respective results. Moreover, we describe also preliminary results of progressive research in the area of uncertain fuzzy ontology representation that will provide us with natural and reasonable instruments for dealing with inconsistencies in empiric data as well as for reasoning. Main future milestones of the ongoing research are debated as well.