Re: semantic technology solutions for mulitlinginal sites - OR 'semantic browsers'?

Dear Ioachim,

I was referring to a multilingual site in the sense of dynamically assembled or static code already in the native languages.

The United Nations uses less than 10 languages and the European Union some 50 odd official languages.

Yet there are some 5,000 plus languages out there of which say the first 500-1,000 have sufficiently large populations of native speakers to warrant various modes of automated translation or dynamic assembly using (semantic) web technology and/or natural language processing.

In only a few certain cases is client side processing possible in our scenarios.

I would love to know where there are currently programs running dealing with languages (indigenous, creole and pidgin), that typically have few defined and formally specified domains of discourse in e.g. the field of science and technology.

This is one of the biggest challenges of making science and technology not only truly open but also accessible to populations with lesser known languages.

Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation


--- On Tue, 12/16/08, Ioachim Drugus <sw@semanticsoft.net> wrote:
From: Ioachim Drugus <sw@semanticsoft.net>
Subject: Re: semantic technology solutions for mulitlinginal sites - OR 'semantic  browsers'?
To: "Jens Lehmann" <lehmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org, linking-open-data@simile.mit.edu
Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 7:19 PM

Greetings,

I believe, this is going to be one of the largest industries based on Semantic Web but multi-lingusitic web will have a slighly different architecture. Here are several ideas which might be useful.

If a sentence in a natural language "makes sense" , then the human
interpreter first builds this sense (meaning) in mind,  then he/she articulates it into another language. Human translation involves two processes: (1) building the sense of the source language expressions, and (2) articulating this sense into the target language

Technologically, I treat sense as Semantic Web content. Therefore, a alongside regular text, site builders can scribble in Semantic Web languages the sense of the text, and an *articulation engine* for a natural language will convey this sense into that natural language.

I would say a *semantic browser*  to be a web agent which comes with
articulation engines for various natural languages and applies the engine for the desired natural language to SemanticWeb content to transform it into a text or speech. I believe the "multi-linguistics" should be on the client side.

Therefore, I treat the 'multi-lingual sites' as a matter of building
*articulation engines* as plugged-ins for browsers. Currently there exist
thousands of ontologies with domain specific knowledge and only technical people can read them. Semantic browsers are the most needed tools to make Semantic Web a democratic phenomenon.

If there is a project somewhere on this, we here would be happy to participate - I think, I have some knowledge of how to build an articulation engine. 
Ioachim, 

Ioachim Drugus, Ph.D.
Main Software Architect,
SemanticSoft, Inc.
www.semanticsoft.net

Jens Lehmann wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Semantics-ProjectParadigm wrote:
>   
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> I am writing proposals for setting up web portals to access digital
>> repositories on a large number of knowledge domains.
>> 
>> The point is that the same information needs to be made available in a
>> large number of languages.
>> 
>> Are there any computer programs, research programs or projects out
there
>> that deal with providing semantic web solutions for information that
>> needs to be made available in a large number of different languages?
>>     
> 
> Do I understand correctly that you want to expose a knowledge base in
> several languages? RDF/RDFS/OWL allow to add language tags to literals,
> i.e. http://dbpedia.org/resource/House has an rdfs:label in several
> languages. (If you were already aware of this, it might be better to ask
> a more specific question.)
> 
> Multilingual CMS are, of course, a different issue as you also need to
> translate UI messages etc.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Jens
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2008 18:12:31 UTC