Lexicon Based Ontology Construction

In order to secure interoperability and allow autonomous agent interaction, software for the web will be required to provide machine processable ontologies. Traditional deliverables of the software development process are the code, technical documentation, to support development and maintenance and use documentation, to provide user support. In the case of web applications, ontologies will also be part of the deliverables. Ontologies will allow machines to process and integrate Web resources intelligently, enable quick and accurate web search, and facilitate communication between a multitude of heterogeneous web-accessible agents [1]. We understand that the responsibility, not only for making explicit this requirement, but also to implement the ontology, belongs to software engineers. Currently the development of ontologies is more of a craft then a systematic discipline. We are proposing a process for the systematic construction of ontologies, centered on the concept of application languages. This concept is rooted on a representation scheme called the language extended lexicon (LEL). We demonstrate our approach using an example in which we implement a machine processable ontology for a meeting scheduler using the ontology language DAML+OIL.