A Method for Converting Thesauri to RDF/OWL

This page supplements a paper that describes a method to convert thesauri to RDF and OWL.

• The paper: A Method for Converting Thesauri to RDF/OWL.
• Authors' web sites: Mark van Assem, Maarten R. Menken, Guus Schreiber, Jan Wielemaker and Bob Wielinga.

The results of the case studies presented in that paper are published here. The cases concern conversions of two thesauri: MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and WordNet.

Case 1: MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

The original XML source and DTDs (2004 version) can be downloaded from National Laboratory of Medicine download section. Note that only the XML files for Descriptors and Qualifiers (and associated DTD) were converted. XSLT was used to convert the original XML to RDF/OWL.

Case 2: WordNet

The original Prolog source (release 2.0) can be downloaded from WordNet download section. Prolog programs (SWI-Prolog) were written for the conversion from Prolog data to RDF/OWL. Recent SWI-Prolog distributions include a semantic web library, which is used in the conversion programs.