Design and evaluation of a semantic enrichment process for bibliographic databases

The limited semantics of thesauri and similar knowledge models hinder the searching and browsing possibilities of the bibliographic databases classified with this type of resource. This work proposes an automatic process to convert a knowledge model into a domain ontology through the alignment with DOLCE, an upper level ontology. This process is facilitated by an intermediary alignment with WordNet, a lexical model. The process has been tested with the thesauri and bibliographic databases of Urbamet and the European Urban Knowledge Network. The Urbamet model has been used to create an atlas of urban related resources with advanced search capabilities.