Towards a terminological knowledge base on Islamic archaeology

Abstract

This paper describes work carried out for the OntoAndalus project at NOVA CLUNL. This project aims at establishing the foundations for a terminological knowledge base (TKB) on Islamic archaeology. The main part of the work carried out so far is the development of an ontology of artefact types in al-Andalusian pottery studies, which was done by reusing the DOLCE+DnS Ultralite foundational ontology. Subsequently, Portuguese and Spanish terms for artefact types were extracted from a corpus of specialised texts and represented by means of lexical networks. The Lexicon Model for Ontologies (Lemon), recently developed by a W3C Community Group, was put forward as a promising framework for integrating language-specific and language-independent information in a future TKB on the domain. The possibility of aligning OntoAndalus with Lemon is also discussed in this paper.