Multilinguality

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