A Suite of Semantic Web Tools Supporting Development of Multilingual Ontologies

Abstract

The multilingual aspects which characterize the (Semantic) Web and the constant demand for more understandable and easy-to-share forms of knowledge representation, push for a more “linguistically aware” approach to ontology development and foresees an environment where formal semantics could coexist with natural language, contributing to improve “shareability” of the content they describe. As a consequence ontologies should be enriched to both cover formally expressed conceptual knowledge as well as to expose content in a linguistically motivated fashion. In this paper we present a suite of tools, libraries and ontolo-gies, ranging from ontology development to language resources access and man-agement, supporting the development of multilingual ontologies. The contribution of this work, going beyond mere tool presentation, is two-fold: the presented tools implicitly embody a new way (methodology?) of rethinking the development of ontologies in terms of making their content easy reusable and comprehensible; moreover, they represent living proofs of software engineering principles asso-ciated to software reuse, documentation, modularity, interaction analysis, applied to the domain of Knowledge Management Software.