Position Paper: Towards the notion of gloss, and the adoption of linguistic resources in formal ontology engineering

• Mustafa Jarrar, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

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Track: Semantic Web

Slot: 11:00-12:30, Friday 26th May

In this paper, we first introduce the notion of gloss for ontology engineering purposes. We propose that each vocabulary in an ontology should have a gloss. A gloss basically is an informal description of the meaning of a vocabulary that is supposed to render factual and critical knowledge to understanding a concept, but that is unreasonable or very difficult to formalize and/or articulate formally. We present a set of guidelines on what should and should not be provided in a gloss. Second, we propose to incorporate linguistic resources in the ontology engineering process. We clarify the importance of using lexical resources as a "consensus reference" in ontology engineering, and so enabling the adoption of the glosses found in these resources. A linguistic resource (i.e. its list of terms and their definitions) shall be seen as a shared vocabulary space for ontologies. We present an ontology engineering software tool (called DogmaModeler), and illustrate its support of reusing of WordNet's terms and glosses in ontology modeling.