Reuse of thesauri by means of Semantic Web technology

Abstract

The purpose of this work was to investigate how ISO standard based thesauri can be reused by means of semantic web technology. Besides the proposal of a conversion method, the goal was also to investigate if it is possible to define a thesaurus meta model using RDF(S)/OWL in a way that generic reasoners are able to deliver the desired thesaurus services, for thesauri of realistic size as there is not much information available about this topic in literature. Focus was on the practical usefullness of the resulting thesaurus system and therefore a thesaurus of 15000 terms has been converted. The thesaurus services were tested using two OWL reasoners and two RDF reasoners. But both tested RDF(S) reasoners, CWM and Sesame, could deliver the desired thesaurus services also when a complete thesaurus of about 150.000 terms was loaded. A consequence of this approach is that some ‘knowledge’ of the thesaurus model which can only be described with OWL, must be hard coded in the application interfacing to the RDF(S) reasoner.