Presenting the relations between concepts, and basing definitions on these is crucially important in terminological databases. The function of short terminological definitions is to distinguish one concept from another, but a detailed description of the intension of a concept is also very important. Particularly when it is a question of scientific concepts, the user of the database benefits from an extensive explanation as well.
My paper introduces the Bank of Finnish Terminology in Arts and Sciences (BFT), a terminological database in the Semantic MediaWiki platform based on the crowdsourcing of specialists from various disciplines. The BFT currently contains over 36000 concepts from 24 domains, and each discipline has its own, distinctive concept systems. The central conceptional relationship is not necessarily a generic one. Particularly when the definition is based on a superordinate concept from general language (e.g., process, phenomenon, area), or when the part of speech of a term is other than a noun, the other concept relations – the part-whole relation or various associative relation or various associative relations – are more significant. One of the three BFT pilot projects deals with botany, where the property relation has a significant role due to the multiplicity of adjectival terms (Pitkänen-Hikkilä 2015).
Moving the BFT plant morphology data into an ontology is currently in progress. The experiment has shown that converting such terminological material into an ontology is not simple if the concept relations are to be presented as precisely as the specialists have presented them in the BFT’s wiki. Moving the desired material fully and accurately into the required format takes effort, but later the ontology will be a useful tool for the terminology work of specialists.
Here you can find the presentation of the research.
Kaarina Pitkänen-Heikkilä
Univeristy of Helsinki
