OWL Expressions on WordNet and EDR

Abstract

There exists certain need for upper ontologies that are sharable among many and various domain ontologies. In English, WordNet, which is originally developed for natural language processing, is also used as ontology as well as lexical resource. Two upper ontologies, OpenCyc and SUMO, which are publicly disclosed, provide mapping information to WordNet. W3C WNET Task Force has proposed the OWL conversion of WordNet. For Japanese, whereas EDR is the only candidate of large-scale upper ontologies, there is no OWL conversion at present. In this paper, several works of OWL conversion on WordNet are investigated and the proposal of OWL conversion by W3C WNET is examined. The WordNet 2.1 has been converted into OWL according to the W3C proposal. Then, EDR is also converted to OWL in consideration of the continuity to WordNet/OWL.