Merging global and specialized linguistic ontologies

There is an increasing interest in linguistic ontologies (e.g. WordNet) for a variety of content-based tasks, including conceptual indexing, word sense disambiguation and cross-language information retrieval. A relevant contribution in this direction is represented by linguistic ontologies with domain specific coverage, which are a crucial topic for the development of concrete application systems. This paper tries to go a step further in the direction of the interoperability of specialized linguistic ontologies, by addressing the problem of their integration with global ontologies. This scenario poses some simplifications with respect to the general problem of merging ontologies, since it enables to define a strong precedence criterion so that terminological information overshadows generic information whenever conflicts arise. We assume the EuroWordNet model and propose a methodology to “plug” specialized linguistic ontologies into global ontologies. Experimental data related to an implemented algorithm, which has been tested on a global and a specialized linguistic ontology for the Italian language, are provided.