LabelTranslator and the NeOn Methodology at the K-CAP 2009 Conference
From NeOn Project
This year the Fifth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2009) took place in Redondo Beach, California. There, the UPM team presented some work related to NeOn research topics at the main research track and poster sessions.
At the main track, a paper was presented on the methodological and technical aspects of Ontology Localization. This work has been carried out by Mauricio Espinoza, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, and Asunción Gómez-Pérez from the Ontology Engineering Group at the UPM. After introducing the different dimensions that have to be taken into account when localizing an ontology (translation problems, multilinguality representation problems, and management problems), the authors propose several strategies for representing multilingual information in ontologies and, specifically, for solving cultural mismatches among the different languages and cultures involved in the localization of an ontology. In this respect, they exemplify how to solve cultural mismatches with the LIR (Linguistic Information Repository), the linguistic model developed within NeOn to provide NeOn ontologies with multilingual information. The authors also present the methodological guidelines they propose for every localization activity. These guidelines are valid for manual as well as for automatic localization activity, inspired by the human translation and Software Engineering localization processes. Next, the authors refer to the application of those guidelines in the design of the localization process followed by LabelTranslator, a NeOn plug-in for a semi-automatic localization of ontologies which currently supports Spanish, English and German and carries out the tasks proposed in the guidelines. Finally, the evaluation of the methodological guidelines is made on the basis of three scenarios: (1) the manual localization of a FAO ontology, (2) the semi-automatic evaluation of Knowledge Web ontologies localized with LabelTranslator, and (3) the usability evaluation of LabelTranslator.
While the guidelines detailed in the paper were specific to one of the nine scenarios identified in the NeOn Methodology, the rest of the scenarios were presented in a poster by Asunción Gómez-Pérez and Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa. This poster offered a broad overview of the new paradigm in Ontology Engineering, in which ontologies or ontology networks can be built in very different ways that range from the basic scenario of ontology development from scratch, to more flexible scenarios in which the reuse and reengineering of ontological and non-ontological resources determine the building process. The poster illustrates and summarizes the main activities that have been defined in the NeOn Methodology for each of the scenarios identified so far.
Story by Elena Montiel-Ponsoda
