Ontology mediation method for building multilingual ontologies

Abstract

Ontology is an emerging technology in building knowledge based information retrieval systems. It is used to conceptualize the information in human understandable manner. Over the years, much importance was given to the systematic development of ontologies. As a result many methods and strategies to build ontology in different domains came up in the field of ontological engineering. These methods contained different steps to plan, design and build ontology efficiently. Most of these methods provided a generic structure to construct ontology. The development of ontology has cut across different domains and applications and this has arisen a need to develop methods to build ontologies in various applications. Nowadays, multilingual ontology applications are developed in various domains to have Knowledge based information retrieval according to the language preferred by user. Multilingual ontology allows sharing of information and data in different languages and thus facilitates multi-language users. A method to develop multilingual ontologies is in need now. In this paper, we propose an ontology mediation method to develop multilingual ontology applications. It explains the steps involved in the development process. A six step method is followed which is done iteratively to develop multilingual ontologies. Merging and mapping techniques are also used in mediation of multilingual ontologies. New algorithms are proposed for merging and mapping multilingual ontologies. The proposed method is experimented by developing multilingual ontology application for Thirukkural, the famous Tamil literature. The experimental results show that multilingual ontologies can be developed using the proposed method and semantic knowledge can be retrieved from the multilingual ontology.