  We present a formal Arabic wordnet built on the basis of a carefully designed
ontology hereby referred to as the Arabic Ontology. The ontology provides a
formal representation of the concepts that the Arabic terms convey, and its
content was built with ontological analysis in mind, and benchmarked to
scientific advances and rigorous knowledge sources as much as this is possible,
rather than to only speakers' beliefs as lexicons typically are. A
comprehensive evaluation was conducted thereby demonstrating that the current
version of the top-levels of the ontology can top the majority of the Arabic
meanings. The ontology consists currently of about 1,300 well-investigated
concepts in addition to 11,000 concepts that are partially validated. The
ontology is accessible and searchable through a lexicographic search engine
(https://ontology.birzeit.edu) that also includes about 150 Arabic-multilingual
lexicons, and which are being mapped and enriched using the ontology. The
ontology is fully mapped with Princeton WordNet, Wikidata, and other resources.
