One ontology to bind them All: The META-SHARE OWL ontology for the interoperability of linguistic datasets on the Web

Abstract

META-SHARE is an infrastructure for sharing Language Resources (LRs) where significant effort has been made into providing carefully curated metadata about LRs. However, in the face of the flood of data that is used in computational linguistics, a manual approach cannot suffice. We present the development of the META-SHARE ontology, which transforms the metadata schema used by META-SHARE into ontology in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that can better handle the diversity of metadata found in legacy and crowd-sourced resources. We show how this model can interface with other more general purpose vocabularies for online datasets and licensing, and apply this model to the CLARIN VLO, a large source of legacy metadata about LRs. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in two public metadata portals for information about language resources.