LingNet: Networking Linguistic and Terminological Ontologies

Abstract

Linguistic description and linguistically-based re-engineering techniques depend on standardized models. LingNet aims at the alignment of multiple standard description models from the terminological, linguistic and localization fields.

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Motivation Linguistic and terminological standards are in daily use for the purpose of linguistic and terminological resource creation (term banks, dictionaries, translation memories etc.). Since there is a variety of standard models available. Examples of terminological and linguistic models are the ISO standard initiatives ISO16620 and the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) [ 1 ]. Furthermore, the purpose of e.g. LexInfo [ 2 ] and the Linguistic Information Repository (LIR) [ 3 ] is to associate multilingual linguistic knowledge with conceptual ontology elements. In the translation memory area standards such as TMX1 (Translation Memory eXchange) and XLIFF2 (XML Localization Interchange File Format) are widely used.

In order to enable interdisciplinary re-use and complementarity it is necessary to establish interoperability between their vocabularies in a principled way. LingNet3 is a model for mapping linguistic and terminological (standard) information in a distributed fashion. The LingNet model adopts a number of modelling decisions from the literature: a knowledge-based, formalism-independent metamodel for capturing semantic alignments between ontologies for linguistic/terminological description [ 4 ], references to external mapping patterns for structural mappings [ 5 ], and a the integration of a lexicalization relation for linking linguistic/terminological resource to ontological concepts [ 6 ].

The novelty of the LingNet model lies in its combination of selected mapping methods and its application to the linguistic/terminological domain. The basic structure of LingNet is illustrated in figure 1 below. 1 http://www.lisa.org/tmx/ 2 http://docs.oasis-open.org/xliff/v1.2/os/xliff-core.pdf 3 first version: http://www.gate.ac.uk/ns/ontologies/LingNet/LingNet-v0.1.owl.

References

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4. Brockmans , S. , Haase , P. , Stuckenschmidt , H.: Formalism-Independent Specification of Ontology Mappings - A Metamodeling Approach , In: Robert Meersman, R. , Tari , Z. et al. (eds), OTM 2006 Conferences , Springer Verlag, Montpellier, France ( 2006 )

5 Scharffe, F. Euzenat , J. and Fensel , D. : Towards design patterns for ontology alignment . In R.L. Wainwright and H. Haddad (eds.): Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) , Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, March 2008 : 2321 - 2325 ( 2008 )

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