Re: Multilinguality

I consider this partially an issue in content interoperability, when the
ontologies are actually in different natural languages (can be very
related to machine translation via interlingua). 

On the other hand, if it's immaterial in which natural language the
ontology concepts are represented, you still need to be able to express
the terms naming or associated with those concepts in alternative
natural languages. B2B e-commerce has this problem, i.e., you need to
provide localization and internationalization support, which will also
include cultural issues (but that is a more tangential issue for us).
So, the Web Ontology Language will need to have so-called "display
names" which will be partially language dependent and partially
application/use/task/device dependent. Synonyms (and their contexts of
use) may need to be supported (this gets into the notion of
"presentation", view too).

I'll look at your url.

Leo

> Raphael Volz wrote:
> 
> Hi all !
> 
> The topic of Mulitlinguality just came up at the telcon...
> 
> The RDFS Schema definition already contains xml:lang markup for
> "rdf:label" properties.
> xml:lang is intended for filtering of tags from an xml perspective,
> if a user opens a document with a given locale, only those tags
> that have been marked with his locale are retrieved (and those not
> marked with the xml:lang attribute).
> 
> This encoding is also part of rdf using one of the abbreviated ways of
> encoding
> rdf in XML. Unfortunally this is not sufficient.
> The value of the label is a literal, and can only therebe referenced
> by one
> edge. Usually the same label can reference different concepts (i.e.
> each
> meaning of a word: concept "Bank_1" being river bank, "Bank_2" being
> the
> financial institution".
> 
> KAON (kaon.semanticweb.org) extends the RDFS metalevel with addtional
> primitives for representing a (multi-lingual) lexical layer...
> See http://kaon.semanticweb.org/2001/11/kaon-lexical.rdf The syntax is
> pretty adhoc, but it could be used as a discussion basis.
> 
> The above n:m relation between concepts and there lexical
> representation
> are actually standards in computational linguistics. Eventually our
> ontology applications in text mining and document management
> management scenarios always rely on such a mapping.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Raphael

-- 
_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst		The MITRE Corporation
mailto:lobrst@mitre.org Intelligent Information Management/Exploitation
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Received on Thursday, 13 December 2001 14:33:20 UTC