Constructing a Grand-Scale Korean Thesaurus as a Base for Ontology Development

This paper reports an effort to construct a grand-scale Korean thesaurus that can be used for enhancing retrieval performance in various fields. This thesaurus is currently being used for indexing and retrieving purpose and new terms are being added to it. As the new demands on retrieval performance increase in Korea, developing a grand-scale ontology appears to be necessary so a project is undertaken to transfer the current thesaurus into an ontology system. The paper describes how the thesaurus is constructed and prepared to be the base for an ontology system.