Pattern for Re-engineering a Term-based Thesaurus, which Follows the Record-based model, to a Lightweight Ontology

Abstract

This pattern for re-engineering non-ontological resources (PR-NOR) fits in the Schema Re-engineering Category proposed by [3]. The pattern defines a procedure that transforms the term-based thesaurus components into ontology representational primitives. This pattern comes from the experience of ontology engineers in developing ontologies using thesauri in several projects (SEEMP 1 , NeOn 2 , and Knowledge Web 3 ). The pattern is included in a pool of patterns, which is a key element of our method for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies [2]. The patterns generate the ontologies at a conceptualization level, independent of the ontology implementation language.