Discovering ontological knowledge in unstructured recipes of a Portuguese monk from the 16th century

Abstract

Ontology learning is often applied to textual data sources with the aim of identifying, extracting and representing their various data elements, as well as their semantic relationships. Ontologies are excellent instruments for the representation of knowledge about one or more domains of knowledge, which enable us to study in detail the knowledge of the domain they host. With this in mind, we devised and developed a semiautomatic ontology learning system. It was specifically oriented for discovering the knowledge contained in a set of ancient texts of culinary recipes of a monk of the 16th century. Using the system, we produced an ontology incorporating a large diversity of culinary elements and their relationships, which offer a very rich field of research of the culinary of the 16th century in Portugal – the ontology was exposed and explored using the native mechanisms of a graph database management system.