A content-focused method for re-engineering thesauri into semantically adequate ontologies using OWL

Abstract

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 merely syntactically and ignore problems arising from interpreting vocabularies as ontologies, i.e. as sets of statements of facts. Current re-engineering methods also do not make use of the semantic capabilities of formal languages in order to detect logical mistakes and 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. Application of the method results in an ontolog..