Ontologies and lexical semantic networks, their editing and browsing

The Semantic Web vision depends on the definition of ontologies as no real-world knowledge-based system of the future Web can achieve satisfactory results without a broad-coverage ontology. It is clear that to be able to enter the semantic web era successfully, the problems of building,general-purpose ontologies. must be solved. This paper presents OASIS - a new ontology authoring system that enables manual as well as (semi)automatic conversion of existing knowledge bases, semantic networks, terminological databases and various other resources to complex ontologies in OWL. The tool is implemented as a client of DEB (Dictionary Editor and Browser) which is able to store, index and efficiently retrieve lexical data. The architecture is based on XML and related W3C standards (XSLT, XML Schema, XPath, DOM). The main feature which brings the efficiency of retrieval is the extension of a standard XSLT processor with the ability to obtain additional data from the dictionary server through the mechanism of nested queries. This technique allows formulation of complex constraints needed in the conversion to OWL.