Reusing and Re-engineering Non-ontological Resources for Building Ontologies

Abstract

With the goal of speeding up the ontology development process, ontology developers are reusing as much as possible available ontological and non-ontological resources such as classification schemes, thesauri, lexicons, and folksonomies, that have already reached some consensus. The reuse of such nonontological resources necessarily involves their re-engineering into ontologies. Based on this new trend, this chapter presents a general method for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies, taking into account that non-ontological resources are highly heterogeneous in their data model and contents. The method is based on the so-called re-engineering patterns, which define a procedure that transforms the non-ontological resource components into ontology representational primitives. This chapter also presents the description of a software library that implements the transformations suggested by the patterns. Finally, the chapter depicts an evaluation of the method.