Simple and EuroWordNet: Towards the Prometheus Ontological Framework

Since concepts are the starting point of all terminological work, it follows that the development of a terminological base should place the main emphasis on the development of a conceptual system. The major objective of the PROMETHEUS project was the development of a generic ontological framework for the design of conceptual systems that would support searching, exploring and navigating multilingual terminological bases, at least for the European languages. Such a framework must provide the necessary semantic distinctions for structuring conceptual systems in specific domains in order to solve semantic problems inherent in linguistic ontologies and to provide a common ontological backbone for sharing and exploiting multilingual terminologies. The paper compares and reports on two well-established ontological frameworks for the development of multilingual resources for the European languages: EuroWordNet (EWN) and SIMPLE top ontologies. It investigates the correspondences between these frameworks, their underlying principles and their suitability to serve as organizational backbones in terminological knowledge bases. Finally, the paper concludes with a description of the implemenetation of the framework, which is based on the organizational principles underlying these multilingual resources.