Cross-Lingual Ontology Mapping and Its Use on the Multilingual Semantic Web

Abstract

Ontology-based knowledge management systems enable the automatic discovery, sharing and reuse of structured data sources on the semantic web. With the emergence of multilingual ontologies, accessing knowledge across natural language barriers has become a pressing issue for the multilingual semantic web. In this paper, a semantic-oriented cross-lingual ontology mapping (SOCOM) framework is proposed to enhance interoperability of ontology-based systems that involve multilingual knowledge repositories. The contribution of cross-lingual ontology mapping is demonstrated in two use case scenarios. In addition, the notion of appropriate ontology label translation, as employed by the SOCOM framework, is examined in a cross-lingual ontology mapping experiment involving ontologies with a similar domain of interest but labelled in English and Chinese respectively. Preliminary evaluation results indicate the promise of the cross-lingual mapping approach used in the SOCOM framework, and suggest that the integrated appropriate ontology label translation mechanism is effective in the facilitation of monolingual matching techniques in cross-lingual ontology mapping scenarios.