Pre-existing business objects (e.g., component parts of large business applications) may already define a hierarchy of related terms and include a search index created by a pre-existing search function. A semantic network including a plurality of semantic knowledge domains may be constructed automatically, based on the objects' initial terms structure and search index, and further modified by search results and related terms returned by the search function. This way, a customer specific semantic network may be constructed automatically from pre-existing software components and terms.