A methodological framework for ontology and multilingual termontological database co-evolution

Abstract

Ontologies and Multilingual Termontology Bases (MTB) are two knowledge artifacts with different characteristics and different purposes. Ontologies are used to formally capture a shared view of the world to solve particular interoperability and reasoning tasks. MTBs are general, contain fewer types of relations and their purposes are to relate several term labels within and across different languages to categories. For regions in which the multilingual aspect is vital, not only does one need an ontology for interoperability, the concepts in that ontology need to be comprehensible for everyone whose native tongue is one of the principal languages of that region. Multilinguality provides also a powerful mechanism to perform ontology mapping, content annotation, multilingual querying, etc. We intend to meet these challenges by linking both methods for constructing ontologies and MTBs, creating a virtuous cycle. In this paper, we present our method and tool for ontology and MTB co-evolution. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.