OntoLex and Onomasiological Ordering: Supporting Topical Thesauri

The OntoLex vocabulary has been designed to capture lexicons and to add their lexicographical knowledge to ontologies in the Semantic Web. Although the specification of the vocabulary posits that OntoLex allows lexicons to be ordered onomasiologically, it does so for a very specific kind of onomasiological ordering only. As a consequence, the vocabulary is currently insufficient for capturing a large proportion of the existing topical thesauri. This paper demonstrates the current expressivity and this shortcoming of OntoLex through two case studies: The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and The Scots Thesaurus. In order for OntoLex to offer full support for topical thesauri and their ordering principles, this paper proposes the addition of a single property to the vocabulary: ontolex:isSenseIn. . . .