Methodological proposal to build a corpus-based ontology in terminology

Corpora are an indispensable resource to improve quality both in the linguistic and conceptual dimension of terminological projects. However, while there is complete agreement that specialised corpora are vital in the linguistic dimension of any terminological project (e.g. to select real contextual examples), there are three different approaches with regard to the conceptual dimension and not all of them employ corpora in their projects. In an attempt to shed some light on the advantages that corpora bring to the representation of specialised knowledge in terminology, this research follows the ontoterminography methodology (Durán-Muñoz 2012) to propose the building of a corpus-based ontology within a terminological project, in particular a specialised resource about an adventure activity (canyoning) in English. More specifically, it describes the different steps that are required to create such an ontology, from the analysis of the specialised domain and the compilation of the corpus to the representation of the specialised knowledge in the form of a corpus-based ontology.