Approaches to modelling thesauri for the semantic web

Legacy thesauri exist, and could provide a starting point to develop ontologies for the semantic web.

If existing thesauri must be discarded and new ontologies developed then assimilation of the semantic web will be slower.

There are three (at least) proposals about how to move from existing thesauri to ontolgoies:

• model thesauri relations as daml/oil relations
• model thesauri contents as RDF schema relations
• model thesauri relations as RDF schema relations

RDF does not support the modelling of classes and properties that RDF Schema does.

RDF Schema does not support constraints on property values as daml/oil do/es.

From XML to RDF, RDF to RDF Schema, to DAML/Oil the languages are progressively more expressive, for progressively more limited tasks.