Translating ontologies in real-world settings

Abstract

To enable knowledge access across languages, ontologies that are often represented only in English, need to be translated into different languages. The main challenge in translating ontologies is to disambiguate an ontology label with respect to the domain modelled by ontology itself. Machine translation services may help in this task; however, a crucial requirement is to have translations validated by experts before the ontologies are deployed. For this reason, real-world applications must implement a support system addressing this task to relieve experts in validating all translations. In this paper we present the Expert Supporting System for Ontology Translation, called ESSOT, which exploits the semantic information of the label’s context for improving the quality of label translations. The system has been tested within the Organic.Lingua project by translating the ontology labels in three languages. In order to evaluate further the effectiveness of the system on handling different domains, additional ontologies were translated and evaluated. The results have been compared with translations provided by the Microsoft Translator API and the improvements demonstrate a better performance of the proposed approach for automatic ontology translation.