From linguistic patterns to ontology structures

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the research on linguistic patterns focusing on the subclassOf relation for the semi-automatic construction of ontologies. Taking as a starting point those ontological structures corresponding to consensual modelling solutions, which are known as Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs), we identified the linguistic patterns that convey the relation captured in ODPs as Lexico-Syntactic Patterns (LSPs) and included them in an LSP-ODP pattern repository. LSPs will permit novice users the conversion of the domain field they want to model into an ontological structure. In the present contribution, the language of classification in Spanish is studied in order to collect the most common ways of verbally expressing the subclassOf relation. Then, the topology of the most common classification patterns is analysed to discover the type of ontological knowledge provided, i.e. which concept relation, and the two essential features in ontology knowledge: exhaustiveness and disjointness