A Collaborative Platform for Multilingual Ontology Development

Ontologies provide a common understanding of a
specific domain of interest that can be communicated between people
and used as background knowledge for automated reasoning in a
wide range of applications. In this paper, we address the design of
multilingual ontologies following well-defined knowledge
engineering methodologies with the support of novel collaborative
development approaches. In particular, we present a collaborative
platform which allows ontologies to be developed incrementally in
multiple languages. This is made possible via an appropriate mapping
between language independent concepts and one lexicalization per
language (or a lexical gap in case such lexicalization does not exist).
The collaborative platform has been designed to support the
development of the Universal Knowledge Core, a multilingual
ontology currently in English, Italian, Chinese, Mongolian, Hindi and
Bangladeshi. Its design follows a workflow-based development
methodology that models resources as a set of collaborative objects
and assigns customizable workflows to build and maintain each
collaborative object in a community driven manner, with extensive
support of modern web 2.0 social and collaborative features.

• Ahmed Tawfik
• Fausto Giunchiglia
• Vincenzo Maltese

• Knowledge Diversity
• Knowledge Representation
• Ontology Development.

[1] Auer, S., Dietzold, S., & Riechert, T. (2006). OntoWiki–a tool for social,
semantic collaboration. In The Semantic Web-ISWC 2006 (pp. 736-
749). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[2] Bouquet, P., & Giunchiglia, F. (1995). Reasoning about theory
adequacy. a new solution to the qualification problem. Fundamenta
Informaticae, 23(2), 247-262.
[3] Dutta, B., Giunchiglia, F. and Maltese, V. (2012). A facet-based
methodology for geo-spatial modelling. Journal on Data Semantics May
2012, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp 57-73.
[4] Farquhar, A., Fikes, R., & Rice, J. (1997). The ontolingua server: A tool
for collaborative ontology construction. International journal of humancomputer
studies, 46(6), 707-727.
[5] Fellbaum, C. (1998). WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[6] Fluit, C., Sabou, M., & Van Harmelen, F. (2006). Ontology-based
information visualization: toward semantic web applications.
In Visualizing the semantic web (pp. 45-58). Springer London.
[7] Ganbold, A., Farazi, F. and Giunchiglia, F. (2014). An Experiment in
Managing Language Diversity Across Cultures. The Sixth International
Conference on Information, Process, and Knowledge Management.
[8] Ghidini, C., Rospocher, M., & Serafini, L. (2010). Moki: a wiki-based
conceptual modeling tool. ISWC 2010 Posters & Demonstrations Track:
Collected Abstracts, 658, 77-80.
[9] Giunchiglia, F., Dutta, B., & Maltese, V. (2014). From Knowledge
Organization to Knowledge Representation. Knowledge Organization.
41(1), 44-56.
[10] Giunchiglia, F., Dutta, B. and Maltese, V. and Farazi, F. (2012). A facetbased
methodology for the construction of large-scale geospatial
ontology. Journal on Data Semantics (JoDS), Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2012), pp.
57-73.
[11] Giunchiglia, F., Maltese, V., & Autayeu, A. (2012). Computing minimal
mappings between lightweight ontologies. International Journal on
Digital Libraries, 12(4), 179-193.
[12] Giunchiglia, F., Maltese, V., B. Dutta (2012). Domains and Context:
First steps towards managing diversity in knowledge. Journal of Web
Semantics (JWS) Vol 12 - 13 (2012): Special Issue: Reasoning with
Context in the Semantic Web.
[13] Giunchiglia, F., Maltese, V., Farazi, F., & Dutta, B. (2010).
GeoWordNet: a resource for geo-spatial applications. In The Semantic
Web: Research and Applications (pp. 121-136). Springer Berlin
Heidelberg.
[14] Giunchiglia, F., Marchese, M., & Zaihrayeu, I. (2007). Encoding
classifications into lightweight ontologies. In Journal on data semantics
VIII (pp. 57-81). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[15] Giunchiglia, F., McNeill, F., Yatskevich, M., Pane, J., Besana, P., &
Shvaiko, P. (2008). Approximate structure-preserving semantic
matching. In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM
2008 (pp. 1217-1234). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[16] Giunchiglia, F., Yatskevich, M., & McNeill, F. (2007). Structure
preserving semantic matching.
[17] Giunchiglia, F., Yatskevich, M., & Shvaiko, P. (2007). Semantic
matching: Algorithms and implementation. In Journal on Data
Semantics IX (pp. 1-38). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[18] Katifori, A., Halatsis, C., Lepouras, G., Vassilakis, C. and Giannopolou
E. (2007). Ontology visualization methods - a survey. Journal on ACM
Computing Surveys (CSUR) Surveys Homepage archive, Volume 39
Issue 4, Article No. 10
[19] Miller, George A. (1995). WordNet: A Lexical Database for
English. Communications of the ACM Vol. 38, No. 11: 39-41.
[20] Palma, R., Haase, P., Corcho, O., Gómez-Pérez, A., & Ji, Q. (2008). An
editorial workflow approach for collaborative ontology development.
In The Semantic Web (pp. 227-241). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[21] Sebastian, A., Noy, N. F., Tudorache, T., & Musen, M. A. (2008). A
generic ontology for collaborative ontology-development workflows.
In Knowledge Engineering: Practice and Patterns (pp. 318-328).
Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[22] Sebastian, A., Tudorache, T., Noy, N. F., & Musen, M. A. (2008).
Customizable workflow support for collaborative ontology development.
In 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software
Engineering (SWESE) at ISWC (Vol. 2008).
[23] Tempich, C., Simperl, E., Luczak, M., Studer, R., & Pinto, H. S. (2007).
Argumentation-based ontology engineering. IEEE Intelligent
Systems, 22(6), 52-59.
[24] Tudorache, T., & Noy, N. F. (2007, July). Collaborative Protege.
In CKC.
[25] Tudorache, T., Noy, N. F., Tu, S., & Musen, M. A. (2008a). Supporting
collaborative ontology development in Protégé (pp. 17-32). Springer
Berlin Heidelberg.
[26] Tudorache, T., Nyulas, C., Noy, N. F., & Musen, M. A. (2013).
WebProtégé: A collaborative ontology editor and knowledge acquisition
tool for the web.Semantic web, 4(1), 89-99.
[27] Tudorache, T., Vendetti, J., & Noy, N. F. (2008b, October). Web-
Protege: A Lightweight OWL Ontology Editor for the Web.
In OWLED (Vol. 432).
[28] Zaihrayeu, I., Sun L., Giunchiglia,F., Pan, W., Ju,Q., Chi, M. and Huang
X (2007). From Web Directories to Ontologies: Natural Language
Processing Challenges