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Ontology Engineering in a Networked World pp 107–145Cite as

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

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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 non-ontological 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Along this chapter, we use either NOR or non-ontological resource without distinction

  2. 2.

    http://www.fao.org/fi/glossary/default.asp

  3. 3.

    http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

  4. 4.

    http://www.fao.org/figis/servlet/RefServlet

  5. 5.

    http://www.fao.org/agrovoc/

  6. 6.

    http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html

  7. 7.

    http://del.icio.us/

  8. 8.

    http://www.rosettanet.org/

  9. 9.

    http://www.edibasics.co.uk/

  10. 10.

    http://www.unspsc.org/

  11. 11.

    http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

  12. 12.

    http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umlsmeta.html

  13. 13.

    http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/

  14. 14.

    http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/index.html

  15. 15.

    http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/index.htm

  16. 16.

    http://libserver.cedefop.europa.eu/ett/en/

  17. 17.

    http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/nomenclatures/index.cfm?TargetUrl=DSP_GEN_DESC_VIEW_NOHDR&StrNom=EDU_TRAINI&StrLanguageCode=EN

  18. 18.

    http://www.fao.org/fishery/asfa/8/en

  19. 19.

    http://aims.fao.org/website/AGROVOC-Thesaurus/sub

  20. 20.

    http://www.fao.org/figis/servlet/RefServlet

  21. 21.

    http://en.istat.it/

  22. 22.

    This document is the outcome of the ontology specification activity (Suárez-Figueroa et al. 2009) (see Chapter 5).

  23. 23.

    A deep analysis of the quality of the resource is out of the scope of this chapter.

  24. 24.

    http://ontologydesignpatterns.org

  25. 25.

    http://ontologydesignpatterns.org

  26. 26.

    Ontology design patterns are included in the ODP portal. The ODP portal is a Semantic Web portal dedicated to ontology design best practices for the Semantic Web, emphasizing particularly ontology design patterns (OPs)

  27. 27.

    http://www.dbpedia.org/

  28. 28.

    Extract, transform, and load (ETL) of legacy data sources is a process that involves (1) extracting data from the outside resources, (2) transforming data to fit operational needs, and (3) loading data into the end target resources (Kimball and Caserta 2004).

  29. 29.

    http://www4.fao.org/asfa/asfa.htm

  30. 30.

    http://mccarthy.dia.fi.upm.es/ontologies/asfa.owl

  31. 31.

    Attributive adjectives are part of the noun phrase headed by the noun they modify, for example, happy is an attributive adjective in “happy people.” In English, the attributive adjective usually precedes the noun in simple phrases but often follows the noun when the adjective is modified or qualified by a phrase acting as an adverb.

  32. 32.

    http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Submissions:PartOf

  33. 33.

    http://dbpedia.org/

  34. 34.

    http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/

  35. 35.

    http://www.seemp.org/

  36. 36.

    http://www.cenitmio.es/

  37. 37.

    http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/

  38. 38.

    http://online.onetcenter.org/

  39. 39.

    http://www.eurodyn.com/

  40. 40.

    http://www.wsmo.org/wsml/

  41. 41.

    http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/index.html

  42. 42.

    http://www.countriesandcities.com/regions/

  43. 43.

    http://park.org/Regions/

  44. 44.

    http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ontology Engineering Group, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo sn., Boadilla del Monte, 28660, Madrid, Spain

    Boris Villazón-Terrazas & Asunción Gómez-Pérez

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  1. Boris Villazón-Terrazas
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  2. Asunción Gómez-Pérez
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Correspondence to Boris Villazón-Terrazas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, sn. Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, 28660, Spain

    Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa

  2. s/n Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, 28660, Spain

    Asunción Gómez-Pérez

  3. , Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK76AA, United Kingdom

    Enrico Motta

  4. Via Nomentana 56, Rome, 00161, Italy

    Aldo Gangemi

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Villazón-Terrazas, B., Gómez-Pérez, A. (2012). Reusing and Re-engineering Non-ontological Resources for Building Ontologies. In: Suárez-Figueroa, M., Gómez-Pérez, A., Motta, E., Gangemi, A. (eds) Ontology Engineering in a Networked World. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24794-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24794-1_6

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