Structuring an ontology of the basic vocabulary of tourism

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

In an attempt to fulfill the needs of a student of Tourism to master the basic vocabulary of tourism and to contribute to the semantic-conceptual study of the lexicon, this paper presents an ontological structuring of the basic vocabulary of tourism which, on the one hand, constitutes a linguistic and pedagogical resource and, on the other hand, can be integrated to specific lexical data bases. Firstly, we present the different kinds of sources which helped us establish the concepts and from which the lexical items were extracted and were constituted by dictionaries, technical books of Tourism and didactic books of English for tourism students. Then we present some problems which were posed during the structuring of the ontology and some possible solutions for them. In the end, we presented a sample of the ontology using the ontology editor Protégé 3.3. We have selected, from each of the different types of sources, lexical and conceptual information relevant to the assembly of both the ontology and vocabularies.