Methods for Porting Resources to the Semantic Web.

Ontologies will play a central role in the development of the Semantic Web. It is unrealistic to assume that such ontologies will be developed from scratch. Rather, we assume that existing resources such as thesauri and lexical data bases will be reused in the development of ontologies for the Semantic Web. In this paper we describe a method for converting existing source material to a representation that is compatible with Semantic Web languages such as RDF(S) and OWL. The method is illustrated with three case studies: converting WordNet, AAT and MeSH to RDF(S) and OWL.