Towards the reuse of standardized thesauri into ontologies

One of the main holdbacks towards a wide use of ontologies is the high building cost. In order to reduce this effort, reuse of existing Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), and in particular thesauri, is a valuable and much cheaper alternative to build ontologies from scratch. In the literature tools to support such reuse and conversion of thesauri as well as re-engineering patterns already exist. However, few of these tools rely on a sort of semi-automatic reasoning on the structure of the thesaurus being converted. Furthermore, patterns proposed in the literature are not updated considering the new ISO 25964 standard on thesauri. This paper introduces a new application framework aimed to convert thesauri into OWL ontologies, differing from the existing approaches for taking into consideration ISO 25964 compliant thesauri and for applying completely automatic conversion rules.