A content focused method for re engineering thesauri into semantically adequate ontologies using OWL
The re engineering of vocabularies into ontologies can save considerable time in the development of ontologies. Current methods that guide the re engineering of thesauri into ontologies often convert vocabularies syntactically only and ignore the problems that stems from interpreting vocabularies as statements of truth (ontologies) Current reengineering methods also do not make use of the semantic capabilities of formal languages like OWL in order to detect logical mistakes and to improve vocabularies. In this paper, we introduce a content focused method for building domain specific ontologies based on a thesaurus, a popular type of vocabulary. The method results in a semantically adequate ontology that does not only contain a semantically rich description of the entities to be modeled, but also enables non trivial consistency checks and classifications based on automated reasoning, and can be integrated with other ontologies following the same development principles. The identification of membership conditions, the alignment to a top level ontology and formal relations, and the consistency check and inference using a reasoner are the central steps in our method. We explain the motivation and sub activities for each of these steps and illustrate their application through a case study in the domain of agricultural fertilizers based on the ACROVOC Thesaurus. Foremost, our method shows that simple syntactic conversions are insufficient to derive an ontology from a thesaurus. Instead, considerable structural changes are required to derive an ontology that corresponds to the reality it represents. Our method relies on a manual development effort and is particularly useful where a highly reliable is a hierarchy is crucial.
Semantic Web