Towards the notion of gloss, and the adoption of linguistic resources in formal ontology engineering

In this paper, we first introduce the notion of gloss for ontology engineering purposes. We propose that each vocabulary in an ontology should have a gloss. A gloss basically is an informal description of the meaning of a vocabulary that is supposed to render factual and critical knowledge to understanding a concept, but that is unreasonable or very difficult to formalize and/or articulate formally. We present a set of guidelines on what should and should not be provided in a gloss. Second, we propose to incorporate linguistic resources in the ontology engineering process. We clarify the importance of using lexical resources as a "consensus reference" in ontology engineering, and so enabling the adoption of the glosses found in these resources. A linguistic resource (i.e. its list of terms and their definitions) shall be seen as a shared vocabulary space for ontologies. We present an ontology engineering software tool (called DogmaModeler), and illustrate its support of reusing of WordNet's terms and glosses in ontology modeling.