Use of shared lexical resources for efficient ontological engineering

Abstract This paper is intended to approach one of the main problems in ontology engineering: the lack of a shared terminology. Nowadays there exists several biomedical ontologies describing overlapping domains, but there is not a clear correspondence between the concepts that are supposed to be equivalent or just similar. These resources are quite precious but their integration and further development are expensive. Terminological or lexical resources may support the ontological development in several stages of the lifecycle of the ontology including ontology integration and the labeling of concepts. In this paper we investigate the use of lexical resources during the ontology lifecycle using the example of the Health-e-Child (HeC) project. We claim that the proper creation and use of a shared lexicon is a cornerstone for the successful application of the Semantic Web technology within life sciences.