Mark van Assem1, Maarten R. Menken1, Guus Schreiber1, Jan Wielemaker2, and Bob Wielinga2
1 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Computer Science, {mark,mrmenken,schreiber}@cs.vu.nl
2 University of Amsterdam, Social Science Informatics (SWI), {wielemaker,wielinga}@swi.psy.uva.nl
This paper describes a method for converting existing thesauri and related resources from their native format to RDF(S) and OWL. The method identifies four steps in the conversion process. In each step, decisions have to be taken with respect to the syntax or semantics of the resulting representation. Each step is supported through a number of guidelines. The method is illustrated through conversions of two large thesauri: MeSH and WordNet.
To appear in Proceedings of the Third International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004), Hiroshima, Japan