Wikitology: Using Wikipedia as an Ontology

Identifying topics and concepts associated with a set of documents is a task common to many applications. It can help in the annotation and categorization of documents and be used to model a person's current interests for improving search results, business intelligence or selecting appropriate advertisements. We have investigated using Wikipedia's articles and associated pages as a topic ontology for this purpose. The benefits of the approach are that the ontology terms are developed through a social process, maintained and kept current by the Wikipedia community, represent a consensus view, and have meaning that can be understood by reading the associated pages.