Terminology Management in Cybersecurity thought Knowledge Organization Systems: an Italian Use Case

Specialized Terminology is usually managed byKnowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) which manipulate andstructure concepts and terms through standardized structuredtechniques. In this paper, an approach to organize and managespecialized terminologies and their update, specifically relatedto the domain of Cybersecurity, is proposed. A preliminaryanalysis and comparison between KOSs showing a higher level ofsemantic representation, i.e., thesauri and ontologies, is presentedin the first section with the objective of clarifying the conceptualframework of these resources. A concrete use case in the domainof Cybersecurity is then described to show the context ofapplication of these two semantic resources, i.e., a project fundedby the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the NationalResearch Council aimed at providing terminology managementand representation in the frame of the Italian CybersecurityObservatory. A transaction between the thesaural and ontologicalrepresentation of the domain knowledge represents the core ofthe approach showing the higher qualitative value that ontologiesare able to provide to represent the domain of interest, due tothe more precise formalization of semantic relationships existingamong concepts.