The Automatic Formation Of Conversion From Chinese Thesaurus To Ontology

The essence of thesauri is to choose, regulate, control, and to reveal the relationship between terms in the vocabulary of natural languages, and to form a collection of controlled vocabulary on the basis of natural language, thus constituting a thesaurus.Each word in the thesaurus is called a descriptor; each descriptor expresses a certain concept. In our country, as a retrieval tool for large-scale integrated technology, the Chinese Thesaurus received descriptors which cover science, medicine, agriculture, engineering and other disciplines.And the descriptors are majorly substantive. It is a main tool for thematic indicating, retrieving, catalogue organizing and indexing. Ontology is a new method of organizing network information. As a tool of notional model,which describing information on the level of semantic knowledge, it has been aroused more and more concern.However, due to the complexity of its own, ontology construction is a time-consuming and laborious work now.As the thesaurus has collected the knowledge of many experts in every field together, including a relatively complete vocabulary of the various disciplines.Therefore, it was proposed to construct ontology based on the existing thesauri.The simple semantic relationships in the thesaurus can provide guidance on the creation of attributes, instances and relationships of ontology. On the base of"Chinese Thesaurus",this paper constructed the Ontology based on thesauri.It has some theoretical and practical value for the further development of thesauri under the Semantic Web.Through the detailed analysis of the definitions, constituent elements and characteristics of Ontology and the Chinese Thesaurus, this paper resulted the advantages and necessity of the conversion from the Chinese Thesaurus to Ontology. Additionally, combined the features of the Chinese Thesaurus,it presented its own procedural steps of ontology construction and formed the SQL database format of the thesaurus in connection with the disadvantages of the hardcopy format of it. Finally, using the java procedure to transfer Jena package, it generated the model of Ontology based on the Chinese Thesaurus automatically. Therefore, it achieved the automatic conversion from the Chinese Thesaurus to Ontology, and use OWL, which is one of the languages of Ontology representation, to formalize the thesaurus.