Towards a seamless multilingual Semantic Web: A study on constructing a cross-lingual ontology

摘要

Cross-lingual ontology research has become a pivotal concern in the global age. Researchers worldwide try to be interoperable with ontologies written not only in English, but also in other languages. Yet, constructing a cross-lingual ontology can be difficult, and a detailed mapping method is often hard to find. This study investigates the practice for constructing a cross-lingual ontology, in the case of the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology and the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) ontologies. By adopting a three-phase research design, a cross-lingual ontology method between English and Traditional Chinese is constructed through the implementation of Protégé. The mapping results between the two languages reveal an accuracy of 80.66% on the exact-match terms, while the Chinese synonyms and related terms expressed by SKOS labels are all proven searchable in our primary evaluation. These promising results demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology proposed by this study, and further suggest that such approach is suitable to be adopted by future researchers to model their cross-lingual ontologies.