Ontology is an important emerging discipline that has the huge potential to improve information organization, management and understanding. It has a crucial role to play in enabling content-based access, interoperability, communications, and providing qualitatively new levels of services on the next wave of web transformation in the form of the Semantic Web. The issues pertaining to ontology generation, mapping and maintenance are critical key areas that need to be understood and addressed. This survey is presented in two parts. The first part reviews the state-of-the-art techniques and work done on semi-automatic and automatic ontology generation, as well as the problems facing such research. The second complementary survey is dedicated to ontology mapping and ontology ‘evolving’. Through this survey, we have identified that shallow information extraction and natural language processing techniques are deployed to extract concepts or classes from free-text or semi-structured data. However, relation extraction is a very complex and difficult issue to resolve and it has turned out to be the main impediment to ontology learning and applicability. Further research is encouraged to find appropriate and efficient ways to detect or identify relations through semi-automatic and automatic means.
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