Mapping WordNet to the Basic Formal Ontology using the KYOTO ontology.
Selja Seppälä · ICBO · 2015
Ontologies are often used in combination with natural language processing (NLP) tools to carry out ontology-related text manipulation tasks, such as automatic annotation of biomedical texts with ontology terms. These tasks involve categorizing relevant terms from texts under the appropriate categories. This requires coupling ontologies with lexical resources. Several projects have realized these kinds of mappings with upper-level ontologies that are extended by domain-specific ontologies (Gangemi et al., 2010; Laparra et al., 2012; Niles and Pease, 2003; Pease and Fellbaum, 2010). However, no such resource is available for the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which is widely used in the biomedical domain.1 We describe and evaluate a semi-automatic method for mapping the large lexical network WordNet 3.0 (WN) to BFO 2.0 exploiting an existing mapping between WN and the KYOTO ontology, which includes an upper-level ontology similar to BFO. Our hypothesis is that a large portion of WN, primarily nouns and verbs, can be semi-automatically mapped to BFO 2.0 types by means of simple mapping rules exploiting another ontology already linked to WN.