From General Ontology to Specialized Ontology: A study based on a single author historical corpus

This paper proposes to deal with the construction of a specialized ontology as the discovery of a new knowledge structure, based on the premise that ontology is a structured knowledge. Our study integrates the following approaches: the mental lexicon approach, the Shakespearean-garden approach, and the ontology-merging as ontology-discovery approach. In particular, WordNet is used both a source of lexical knowledge and a (linguistic) ontology. SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology), on the other hand, is used as an upper ontology that provides fragments of well-structures knowledge. These two resources are compared and merged through Sinica BOW (Academia Sinica Bilingual Ontological Wordnet). The domain knowledge that we model our specialized ontology on is the collection of Su-Shi's poems from Song dynasty. This work is chosen not only because the knowledge system is sufficiently different from the current one, but also because it is well- suited for the text-based and lexicon- driven strategy to discover knowledge structure. This study supports our text- based and lexicon-driven approach as an efficient way to build a specialized ontology as well as to infer domain knowledge. Based on this result, we further outlined an architecture for a workbench for semi-automatic construction of specialized ontologies.