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Turning Lead into Gold? Feeding a Formal Knowledge Base with Informal Conceptual Knowledge

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Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: Ontologies and the Semantic Web (EKAW 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2473))

Abstract

We describe an ontology engineering methodology by which conceptual knowledge is extracted from an informal medical thesaurus (UMLS) and automatically converted into a formal description logics system. Our approach consists of four steps: concept definitions are automatically generated from the UMLS source, integrity checking of taxonomic and partonomic hierarchies is performed by the terminological classifier, cycles and inconsistencies are eliminated, and incremental refinement of the evolving knowledge base is performed by a domain expert. We report on experiments with a knowledge base composed of 164,000 concepts and 76,000 relations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Text Knowledge Engineering Lab, Universität Freiburg, Werthmannplatz 1, D-79085, Freiburg

    Udo Hahn

  2. Abteilung Medizinische Informatik, Universitätsklinikum Freiburg, Stefan-Meier-Str. 26, D-79104, Freiburg

    Stefan Schulz

Authors
  1. Udo Hahn
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  2. Stefan Schulz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo, s/n, 28660, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

    Asunción Gómez-Pérez

  2. Intelligent Software Components, S.A. (iSOCO), Francisca Delgado, 11 - 2∘, 28108, Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain

    V. Richard Benjamins

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hahn, U., Schulz, S. (2002). Turning Lead into Gold? Feeding a Formal Knowledge Base with Informal Conceptual Knowledge. In: Gómez-Pérez, A., Benjamins, V.R. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: Ontologies and the Semantic Web. EKAW 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2473. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45810-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45810-7_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44268-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45810-4

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