An Environment for Semi-automatic Annotation of Ontological Knowledge with Linguistic Content

Both the multilingual aspects which characterize the (Semantic) Web and the demand for more easy-to-share forms of knowledge representation, being equally accessible by humans and machines, push the need for a more “linguistically aware” approach to ontology development. Ontologies should thus express knowledge by associating formal content with explicative linguistic expressions, possibly in different languages. By adopting such an approach, the intended meaning of concepts and roles becomes more clearly expressed for humans, thus facilitating (among others) reuse of existing knowledge, while automatic content mediation between autonomous information sources gets far more chances than otherwise. In past work we introduced OntoLing [7], a Protégé plug-in offering a modular and scalable framework for performing manual annotation of ontological data with information from different, heterogeneous linguistic resources. We present now an improved version of OntoLing, which supports the user with automatic suggestions for enriching ontologies with linguistic content. Different specific linguistic enrichment problems are discussed and we show how they have been tackled considering both algorithmic aspects and profiling of user interaction inside the OntoLing framework.