BDCon: A Spanish knowledge database

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002)

Abstract

In this paper we describe a knowledge base that has been built using the partially structured knowledge from encyclopaedias. The BDCon (from the Spanish: Base de Datos de Conocimiento) is a general ontology built around an extended Spanish lexicon extracted from two encyclopaedias and a cartographic database. It is composed by a number of interconnected knowledge structures, each of them covering a different aspect of world knowledge. The purpose of the BDCon is to classify the contents of various reference works publishing companies, as well as to support a set of advanced linguistic tools.