EcoLexicon: A Frame-Based Knowledge Base for the Environment

Abstract

EcoLexicon (http://manila.ugr.es/visual) is a frame-based specialized knowledge resource on the environment. Although currently it can be regarded as a linguistic ontology, it is gradually evolving towards the status of a formal ontology. As such, it focuses on: (1) conceptual organization; (2) the multidimensional nature of terminological units; (3) the extraction of semantic and syntactic information through the use of multilingual corpora. Based on Frame Semantics [Fillmore 1977, 1982, 1992], EcoLexicon is structured in terms of knowledge frames that are organized in an ontological structure. In this case, one of the objectives of EcoLexicon is to achieve interoperability for descriptions in Spanish, English, and German of environmental entities (concepts and roles). At a macrostructural level, the most generic conceptual categories are configured in a prototypical domain event which provides a frame for the organization of more specific concepts in sub-hierarchies [Faber et al. 2007], [León, Reimerink, Faber 2008]. At the microstructural level, specialized concepts are described in terms of a closed inventory of conceptual relations. EcoLexicon represents this conceptual structure of the environmental domain in a visual thesaurus. EcoLexicon and its multimodal visualization of the environmental knowledge domain combines conceptual information with linguistic data and images to meet the communicative as well as cognitive needs of different types of end-users such as, students, researchers, translators, technical writers and experts.