Experiences with Multilingual Modeling in the Development of the International Classification of Traditional Medicine Ontology

Abstract. The World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with several international stakeholders have started recently the work on the International Classification of Traditional Medicine (ICTM), which will provide a standardized system for encoding and collecting health statistics data related to Traditional Medicine practice throughout the world. ICTM is represented in OWL, and is developed by Traditional Medicine experts in a collaborative Semantic Web platform, called iCAT-TM. The content of ICTM is developed simultaneously in four languages (English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean). In this paper, we describe how we modeled the multilingual content, the Web platform used for editing, and some of the challenges we have encountered related to the multilingual aspects of the model and use of the platform. 1 The International Classification of Traditional Medicine (ICTM) The World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with a large group of international stakeholders is developing the International Classification of Traditional Medicine (ICTM). 1 ICTM will provide a standardized international system for classifyin