Ontology Acquisition: Technology

In order to aid ontology acquisition and maintenance, to check its consistency, and to support interactions with lexicographers, a variety of semi-automated tools have been developed and deployed in the Mikrokosmos project. These are state of the art software tools with easy-to-use graphical interfaces and are particularly useful for visualizing a large, intricate classification system while editing or browsing it. Some of the tools were used to produce the displays captured in the figures in this article. Tools have been developed for:

• browsing the hierarchies and the internals of concepts in the ontology;
• editing graph structures;
• translating between two different representations (e.g., the object oriented representation suitable for computational purposes and the plain text representation that is more suitable for manual search and maintenance purposes);
• checking for consistency both within the ontology and between the ontology and the lexicon and for conformance with the guidelines; and
• supporting interactions with lexicon acquirers through the use of a graphical interface for submitting requests for changes or additions.