A Pattern Based Approach for Re-engineering Non-Ontological Resources into Ontologies

With the goal of speeding up the ontology development process, ontology engineers are starting to reuse as much as possible available ontologies and non-ontological resources such as classification schemes, thesauri, lexicons and folksonomies, that already have some degree of consensus. The reuse of such non-ontological resources necessarily involves their re-engineering into ontologies. Non-ontological resources are highly heterogeneous in their data model and contents: they encode different types of knowledge, and they can be modeled and implemented in different ways. In this paper we present (1) a typology for non-ontological resources, (2) a pattern based approach for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies, and (3) a use case of the proposed approach.