To see or not to see: concept visualization in terminological knowledge bases

Knowledge representation is central to Artificial Intelligence, since any intelligent system should include knowledge about the world and provide representations for objects, processes, properties, and relations between objects. The cognitive shift in Terminology has affected the way lexicographers and terminologists understand and describe specialized language, promoting the inclusion of semiotic alternatives to depict knowledge and describe specialized meaning. Such representations and descriptions are then crucial in terminological knowledge bases, where different media coexist to enhance the multidimensional character of concepts. However, so far little attention has been paid in Terminology and Artificial Intelligence to graphic information, including visual resources and pictorial material, in ontology-based multimodal termbases. In this article, we explore the relationship between visual and textual information, and search for a principled way to include images that best represent the linguistic, conceptual and contextual information contained in terminological knowledge bases.