Ontologies have been criticized because they are not sufficiently flexible, and thus cannot capture the dynamism and complexity of reality. However, they have increasingly come into focus because of the need for knowledge management in both general and specialized knowledge domains. EcoLexicon is a frame-based visual thesaurus on the environment that is gradually evolving towards the status of a formal ontology. For this purpose, the information in its relational database is in the process of being linked to the ontological system of FunGramKB, a multipurpose knowledge base that has been specifically designed for natural language understanding with modules for lexical, grammatical, and conceptual knowledge. This enables the explicitation of specialized knowledge as an extension of general knowledge through its representation in the domain-specific satellite ontology of a main general ontology.

EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on the environment. It is currently being converted into a domain-specific ontology, however, ontological properties are modelled according to surface semantics. For this reason, we are integrating our TKB in the form of a “satellite ontology” into FunGramKB, a multipurpose knowledge base specifically designed for natural language understanding. We explain how the dynamism of environmental concepts can benefit from a formal description in meaning postulates and their inclusion in FunGramKB Cognicon scripts. This would lead to the automatic generation of flexible conceptual networks and definitional templates across different contexts.