In recent years there have been some efforts to automate the ontology acquisition and construction process. The proposed systems differ from each other in some distinguishing factors and have many features in common. This paper presents the state of the art in ontology learning (OL) and introduces a framework for classifying and comparing OL systems. The dimensions of the framework answer to questions about what to learn, from where to learn and how to learn. They include features of the input, the methods of learning and knowledge acquisition, the elements learned, the resulted ontology and also the evaluation process. To extract the framework over 50 OL systems or modules from the recent workshops, conferences and published journals are studied and seven prominent of them with most differences are selected to be compared according to our framework. In this paper after a brief description of the seven selected systems we will describe the framework dimensions. Then we will place the representative ontology learning systems into our framework. At last we will describe the differences, strengths and weaknesses of various values for our dimensions in order to present a guideline for researchers to choose the appropriate features (dimensions’ values) to create or use an OL system for their own domain or application.
