Some Considerations in Structuring a Terminological Knowledge Base

Exploiting the computational instruments of ItalWordNet (IWN), we built a terminological Database containing about 3000 lemmas. This allowed us to outgo the concept of “dictionary”, and obtain data not only described (by the definition), but also codified (by relations), easily managed automatically and linked to the corresponding closest concepts in English through the Inter-Lingual Index (ILI). We started to design the terminological data base top level, identifying the most relevant and representative domain concepts. The users demand has determined the need of managing the ever-increasing new technical terminology which includes also very different domains as the juridical or the economic one. Up to now our database is connected, by means of the ’plug_in’ relations, to the general ontology which IWN inherited from EuroWordNet. Now we outline a new domain ontology design, for better defining the boundary of this research, setting the base of the terminological concepts and gaining more functional information. Before defining the ontology, a reflection is preliminary about the concept of ’term’ and ‘domain’, the ’relevance’ of each term, the knowledge potential of the terminological lexicon, together with the possibility of manipulating this knowledge with huge cognitive effects, specifying how to represent it as a concrete (suitable to be instantiated) data structure. The set of characteristics recognized in our terminological Database and verified, lead us to qualify it a Knowledge Base System, that is a body of represented knowledge, based on a conceptualized view of the world, with axioms and inference rules productive of new knowledge generated from existing one.