Ontology, in the sense of Knowledge Engineering, is one of the most promising perspectives for Terminology today.

 

By proposing an « extralinguistic » representation of the conceptual system that makes up any terminology, ontology not only allows the operationalization of terminologies for information processing purposes (specialized translation, semantic and multilingual search engines, knowledge management, etc.), but also renews the discipline of Terminology in its foundations, principles and methods, hence offering new possibilities.

 

The problem is then the construction of the ontology.

 

Protégé is the most commonly used ontology editor. Free and open-source, it is supported by a huge and strong community. It therefore seems natural to use Protégé for the construction of the ontology. A first and simplest approach is to consider the terms as labels on classes structured in a hierarchy (subsets) without the need to define these classes more precisely. The problem becomes more complicated if we want an explicit representation of the terms and a more precise definition of the classes. Indeed, the concept theories in terminology and ontology (knowledge engineering) are not always compatible, e.g. ISO standards (1087 and 704) and Description Logic.