Multilinguality in ontologies has become an impending need for institutions worldwide that have to deal with data and linguistic resources in different natural languages. Since most ontologies are developed in one language, obtaining multilingual ontologies implies to localize or adapt them to a concrete language and culture community. As the adaptation of the ontology conceptualization demands considerable efforts, we propose to modify the ontology terminological layer by associating an external repository of linguistic data to the ontology. With this aim we provide a model called Linguistic Information Repository (LIR) that associated to the ontology meta-model allows terminological layer localization

Aguado de Cea, G.

Gómez-Pérez, A.

Montiel-Ponsoda, Elena

English

Servicio de Coordinación de Bibliotecas de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Enriching ontologies with multilingual information 
Guadalupe Aguado de Cea1, Asunción Gómez-Pérez1, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda1
 
1 Ontology Engineering Group, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 
Campus de Montegancedo s/n, 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid 
{lupe, asun, emontiel}@fi.upm.es 
Abstract. Multilinguality in ontologies has become an impending need for 
institutions worldwide that have to deal with data and linguistic resources in 
different natural languages. Since most ontologies are developed in one 
language, obtaining multilingual ontologies implies to localize or adapt them to 
a concrete language and culture community. As the adaptation of the ontology 
conceptualization demands considerable efforts, we propose to modify the 
ontology terminological layer by associating an external repository of linguistic 
data to the ontology. With this aim we provide a model called Linguistic 
Information Repository (LIR) that associated to the ontology meta-model 
allows terminological layer localization.  
Keywords: multilingual ontologies, Ontology Localization, Linguistic 
Information Repository (LIR) 
1   Introduction 
Multilinguality in ontologies is nowadays demanded by institutions worldwide 
with a huge number of resources in different languages. One of these institutions is 
the FAO1. Within the NeOn project2, the FAO is currently leading a case study on 
fishery stocks in order to improve the interoperability of its information systems. The 
FAO, as an international organization with five official languages -English, French, 
Spanish, Arabic and Chinese- deals with heterogeneous and multilingual linguistic 
resources with different granularity levels. This scenario is an illustrative example of 
the need for semantically organizing great amounts of multilingual data. When 
providing ontologies with multilingual data, one of the activities identified in the 
NeOn ontology network development process is the Ontology Localization Activity, 
that consists in adapting an ontology to a concrete language and culture community, 
as defined in [1]. In particular, our aim is to obtain multilingual ontologies by 
localizing its terminological layer (terms or labels that name ontology elements), 
rather than modifying its conceptualization. Thus, we propose to link ontologies with 
a linguistic model, called Linguistic Information Repository (LIR), whose main 
feature is that it provides (1) a complete and complementary amount of linguistic data 
                                                          
1 http://www.fao.org/ 
2 http://www.neon-project.org/ 
107
that allows localization of ontology elements to a specific linguistic and cultural 
universe, and, (2) a unified access to aggregated multilingual data.  
2   Related Work 
Regarding the activity of Ontology Localization, we have identified three ways of 
modelling multilinguality in ontologies: 1) inclusion of multilingual labels in the 
ontology by means of the rdfs:label and rdfs:comment properties (most 
widespread modality), 2) mapping of several conceptualizations in different natural 
languages through an interlingual set of common concepts (as in EWN3), and 3) 
association of an external linguistic model to the ontology (as in LingInfo [2]). The 
first modality option restricts the amount and type of linguistic information that can 
be associated to the ontology. The second option requires a huge effort at two stages: 
first, when a new language has to be integrated in the multilingual system, since a 
new conceptualization has to be developed, and second, by the establishment of 
alignments among conceptualizations or between the new conceptualization and the 
interlingua. In this way, our hypothesis is that the best solution lies on the third 
option, in which the type and quantity of linguistic information is not restricted, and 
the linguistic elements that compose the model can be related among them. Regarding 
this latter option, we argue that existing models have not been intended to cover 
localization needs, and do not include enough information in this sense, but rather 
focus on other linguistic information such as the morphosyntactic aspects of ontology 
labels.   
3   Proposed Approach 
With the aim of providing available ontologies in one natural language with 
multilingual information thus allowing their localization, we have designed the LIR 
[3,4,5] within the NeOn project. The LIR is an external linguistic model based on 
existing linguistic (LMF4) and terminological (TMF5) representation schemas. The 
LIR permits the association of a set of linguistic data to any element in the ontology. 
The main classes or data categories that compose the LIR are: LexicalEntry, 
Lexicalization, Sense, Definition, Language, Source, Note, and Usage Context (as can 
be seen in Figure 1). Thanks to the relations that can be established among the LIR 
classes, the LIR mainly accounts for: well-defined relations within lexicalizations in 
one language and across languages, and conceptualization mismatches among 
different cultures and languages. The main benefits of this approach against the 
modeling options presented in section 2 are the following: a) the association of an 
unrestricted quantity of linguistic information to ontology elements; b) the 
establishment of relations among the linguistic elements, as well as the performance 
                                                          
3 http://www.illc.uva.nl/EuroWordNet/ 
4 Lexical Markup Framework ISO/CD 24613 
5 Terminological Markup Framework ISO 16642 
108
of complex operations (reasoning) with them; c) the access and manipulation of the 
linguistic data (terminological layer) without interfering with the conceptualization, 
with the resulting benefits for non-ontology engineers; and d) the reuse of the 
contained linguistic information for other applications.  
Up to now, the LIR has been implemented as an ontology in OWL [4], and is 
currently supported by the LabelTranslator NeOn plug-in [6] for an automatic 
localization of ontologies. A first set of tests has been conducted within NeOn to asses 
the suitability of the LIR model for the linguistic needs of the FAO. The LIR has 
proved to satisfy the FAO needs for i) establishing relations among lexicalizations 
within and across languages, ii) specifying variants for dialects or local languages, 
and iii) explicitly expressing translation specificities.  
 
 
Figure 1. The LIR Model 
Main References 
1. Suárez-Figueroa, M.C. and Gómez-Pérez, A. First Attempt towards a Standard Glossary of 
Ontology Engineering Terminology. 8th International Conference on Terminology and 
Knowledge Engineering (TKE2008), Copenhagen (2008) 
2. Buitelaar, P., M. Sintek, M. Kiesel. 2006. A Multi-lingual/Multimedia Lexicon Model for 
Ontologies. In Proc. ESWC’06, Budva, Montenegro (2006) 
3. Montiel-Ponsoda, E., Aguado de Cea, G., Gómez-Pérez, A., and Peters, W. Modelling 
multilinguality in ontologies. In Coling 2008: Companion volume - Posters and 
Demonstrations, Manchester, UK (2008) 
109
4.  Montiel-Ponsoda, E. and Peters, W. (coordinators): Multilingual and Localization Support 
for Ontologies. NeOn Project Deliverable 2.4.2 (2008)
 
5. Peters, W., Montiel-Ponsoda, E., Aguado de Cea, G. Localizing Ontologies in OWL. In Proc. 
OntoLex, Busan, South Corea (2007) 
6. Espinoza, M., Gómez-Pérez, A., Mena, E.: Enriching an Ontology with Multilingual 
Information. In Proc. of ESWC'08, Tenerife (Spain), LNCS Springer, ISBN 978-3-540-
68233-2, ISSN-0302-9743, pp. 333--347 (2008) 
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