Reusing the Mikrokosmos Ontology for Concept-based Multilingual Terminology Databases

Abstract

This paper reports work carried out within a multilingual terminology project (OncoTerm) in which the Mikrokosmos (µK) ontology (Mahesh, 1996; Viegas et al 1999) has been used as a language independent conceptual structure to achieve a truly concept-based terminology database (termbase, for short). The original ontology, containing nearly 4,700 concepts and available in Lisp-like format (January 1997 version), was first converted into a set of tables in a relational database. A specific software tool was developed in order to edit and browse this resource. This tool has now been integrated within a termbase editor and released under the name of OntoTerm™. In this paper we focus on the suitability of the µK ontology for the representation of domain-specific knowledge and its associated lexical items.