Introduction

During the last few years, a number of studies aimed at interfacing ontologies and lexical resources have been done. This chapter aims to clarify the current picture of this domain. It compares ontologies built following different methodologies and analyses their combination with lexical resources. A point defended in this chapter is that different methodologies lead to very different characteristics for the resulting systems. We classify these methodologies and show how current projects, among which many contributions to this book figure, fit into this classification. We also present the tools available for facilitating the interfacing between ontologies and lexical resources.

In Section 10.2, we will introduce our methodology classification for combining ontologies and lexical resources, and in the next section, we will detail some of the most popular top-level ontologies, namely DOLCE, which has been introduced in Chapter 3, OpenCyc and SUMO (Niles and Pease, 2001), introduced in Chapter 2. These ontologies are all quite different from one another, although this might not be evident to the newcomer. Our purpose is to discuss the methodologies used to combine ontologies with lexical resources. In Section 10.4, based on the ground covered in the first two sections, we will show how actual initiatives fit into our classification. The lexical resources considered in the chapter are, for the most part, those of the WordNet family (Fellbaum, 1998) and are therefore good candidates for becoming linguistic ontologies.