Abstract

A practical approach to the development of ontologies from thesauri is presented, using the Methontology methodology, which permits the use of any language developed so far for the implementation of ontologies, as well as semantic web annotations based on these ontologies. This approach is an alternative to SKOS-Core, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approach to publication of thesauri within the semantic web. The advantage of our approach is that it provides significantly more semantic information than a thesaurus (and, hence, than does SKOS-Core). A two-level ontological architecture for domain representation is also described, consisting of a knowledge representation ontology [based on Ranganathan’s (1967) facets] for the representation of high-level relationships in the domain and a domain ontology for the description of a particular field within the domain.