Abstract
This paper describes a method for converting existing thesauri and related resources from their native format to RDF(S) and OWL. The method identifies four steps in the conversion process. In each step, decisions have to be taken with respect to the syntax or semantics of the resulting representation. Each step is supported through a number of guidelines. The method is illustrated through conversions of two large thesauri: MeSH and WordNet.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
ANSI/NISO. Guidelines for the construction, format, and management of monolingual thesauri. Ansi/niso z39.19-2003 (2003)
Fellbaum, C. (ed.): WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Bradford Books (1998)
International Organization for Standardization. Documentation - guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri. Iso 2788-1986 (1986)
Goldbeck, J., Fragoso, G., Hartel, F., Hendler, J., Parsia, B., Oberthaler, J.: The National Cancer Institute’s Thesaurus and Ontology. Journal of Web Semantics 1(1) (December 2003), http://www.mindswap.org/papers/WebSemantics-NCI.pdf
Hollink, L., Schreiber, A.T., Wielemaker, J., Wielinga, B.J.: Semantic annotation of image collections. In: Handschuh, S., Koivunen, M., Dieng, R., Staab, S. (eds.) Knowledge Capture 2003 – Proceedings Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation Workshop, pp. 41–48 (2003)
Johnston, D., Nelson, S.J., Schulman, J.-L.A., Savage, A.G., Powell, T.P.: Redefining a thesaurus: Term-centric no more. In: Proceedings of the 1998 AMIA Annual Symposium (1998)
Miles, A., Matthews, B.: Review of RDF thesaurus work. Deliverable 8.2, version 0.1, SWAD-Europe (2004), http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliverables/8.2.html
Miles, A., Matthews, B., Wilson, M.: RDF encoding of multilingual thesauri. Deliverable 8.3, version 0.1, SWAD-Europe (2004), http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliverables/8.3.html
U.S. National Library of Medicine. Introduction to MeSH in XML format (November 2001), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/xmlmesh.html
U.S. National Library of Medicine. MeSH tree structures (May 2004), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/introtrees.html
Peterson, T.: Introduction to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1994), See also http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/
Soergel, D., Lauser, B., Liang, A., Fisseha, F., Keizer, J., Katz, S.: Reengineering thesauri for new applications: the AGROVOC example. Journal of Digital Information 4(4) (March 2004)
Soualmia, L.F., Goldbreich, C., Darmoni, S.J.: Representing the mesh in owl: Towards a semi-automatic migration. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation (KR-MED 2004), Whistler, Canada, June 2004, pp. 81–87 (2004)
Wielemaker, J., Schreiber, A.T., Wielinga, B.J.: Prolog-based infrastructure for rdf: performance and scalability. In: Fensel, D., Sycara, K., Mylopoulos, J. (eds.) ISWC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2870, pp. 644–658. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Wielinga, B., Wielemaker, J., Schreiber, G., van Assem, M.: Methods for porting resources to the semantic web. In: Bussler, C.J., Davies, J., Fensel, D., Studer, R. (eds.) ESWS 2004. LNCS, vol. 3053, pp. 299–311. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Wroe, C.J., Stevens, R., Goble, C.A., Ashburner, M.: A methodology to migrate the Gene ontology to a description logic environment using DAML+OIL. In: Proceedings of the 8th Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB 2003), Lihue, Hawaii, USA, January 2003, pp. 624–635 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
van Assem, M., Menken, M.R., Schreiber, G., Wielemaker, J., Wielinga, B. (2004). A Method for Converting Thesauri to RDF/OWL. In: McIlraith, S.A., Plexousakis, D., van Harmelen, F. (eds) The Semantic Web – ISWC 2004. ISWC 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3298. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30475-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30475-3_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23798-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30475-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive