Facilitating ontology (re)use by means of a categorization framework

Abstract

Ontologies as means for conceptualizing and structuring domain knowledge within a community of interest are seen as a key to realize the Semantic Web vision. However, the decentralized nature of the Web makes achieving consensus across communities difficult, thus, hampering efficient knowledge sharing between them. To address this problem of heterogeneity we propose a Categorization Framework (CF) that makes it possible to use (multilingual) terminology to specify concepts and concept relations in domain ontologies. Such CF could describe the meaning of concepts and concept relations by means of terminological information and external references. We believe that such (multilingual) ontology description could enhance the (re)usability and facilitate the coordination1 of domain ontologies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.