Creating Ontology from Persian Thesauri

Ontologies can play a significant role in information systems, natural language processing and Knowledge engineering. As common lexicon is the prerequisite for knowledge sharing through language, shared ontologies is the prerequisite for knowledge sharing through information technology. To speed up the ontology development process, as ontology developers are reusing all available ontological and non-ontological resources such as different domain ontologies and lexicons, we use the basic sciences thesauri previously developed at IRANDOC as resources for ontology construction. For this purposes, we firstly merge thesauri and transform the data into ISO 25964 standard. Then we built conceptual model based on the terms and their relationships in thesauri and the concept maps that were designed by domain experts for each basic sciences (Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geology and Mathematics). Ultimately, the ontology was generated by implementing the model in OWL, to be used in information retrieval system.