A Model for Language Annotations on the Web

Abstract

Several annotation models have been proposed to enable a multilingual Semantic Web. Such models hone in on the word and its morphology and assume the language tag and URI comes from external resources. These resources, such as ISO 639 and Glottolog, have limited coverage of the world’s languages and have a very limited thesaurus-like structure at best, which hampers language annotation, hence constraining research in Digital Humanities and other fields. To resolve this ‘outsourced’ task of the current models, we developed a model for representing information about languages, the Model for Language Annotation (MoLA), such that basic language information can be recorded consistently and therewith queried and analyzed as well. This includes the various types of languages, families, and the relations among them. MoLA is formalized in OWL so that it can integrate with Linguistic Linked Data resources. Sufficient coverage of MoLA is demonstrated with the use case of French.