Senior Project - Quine

Since 1949, Sandia National Laboratories has developed science-based technologies that support national security. Sandia supports both applied science and a diversity of long-term research in nuclear weapons, non-proliferation, military technology, energy and infrastructure, and homeland security.

The purpose of this project was to develop a software system for automatically generating ontologies. An ontology is a model of a particular field of knowledge -- a set of concepts and their attributes -- as well as the relationships between those concepts. Ontologies are useful for knowledge sharing and for all kinds of intelligent applications that "understand" the meaning of words and concepts. They are behind a new generation of information technologies.

This software automatically generates ontologies from information embedded in the World Wide Web. The methods developed find relationships and associations between words, concepts and expressions. Given a list of words or expressions, the system yields a list of associated expressions, with a weight for each representing the strength of the association between them. The ontology can be accessed by users via a web-based user interface. The bulk of the algorithms were developed in C++, while the database containing the ontology was developed with PostgreSQL.