The general objective of this work is to provide domain- and resource-independent methods and tools for speeding up the ontology development process. This is achieved by reusing and re-engineering available non-ontological resources (NORs) as much as possible. To fulfil this overall goal, the author has decomposed this publication into the following methodological and technological objectives:

• The definition of methodological aspects related to the reuse of non-ontological resources for building ontologies
• The definition of methodological aspects related to the re-engineering of non-ontological resources for building ontologies
• The creation of a library of patterns for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies
• The development of a software library, NOR2O, that implements the suggestions given by the re-engineering patterns.