Ontological Conceptualization Based on the SKOS

Abstract

Ontological conceptualization refers to the process of creating an abstract view of the domain of interest through a set of interconnected concepts. In this paper, a thesaurus-based methodology is proposed for systematic ontological conceptualization in the manufacturing domain. The methodology has three main phases, namely, thesaurus development, thesaurus evaluation, and thesaurus conversion and it uses simple knowledge organization system (SKOS) as the thesaurus representation formalism. The concept-based nature of a SKOS thesaurus makes it suitable for identifying important concepts in the domain. To that end, novel thesaurus evaluation and thesaurus conversion metrics that exploit this characteristic are presented. The ontology conceptualization methodology is demonstrated through the development of a manufacturing thesaurus, referred to as ManuTerms. The concepts in ManuTerms can be converted into ontological classes. The whole conceptualization process is the stepping stone to developing more axiomatic ontologies. Although the proposed methodology is developed in the context of manufacturing ontology development, the underlying methods, tools, and metrics can be applied to development of any domain ontology. The developed thesaurus can serve as a standalone lightweight ontology and its concepts can be reused by other ontologies or thesauri.