CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ontologyprotege
Alexandrina Sbiera
Alexandrina Sbiera

Reputation: 51

How to create bilingual ontology in Protege?

I want to create a web application based on semantic web. The knowledge base is an ontology. My problem is that my application have to supports two languages (English and Romanian). In this moment the only solution that I have is to create two different ontologies (with the same values only translated) but I think is possible to create one that supports this two languages.
So I want to found the way to do these things in Protege. Can you help me with any ideas? Thanks (sorry for my bad English)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 990

Answers (1)

Ian Dickinson
Ian Dickinson

Reputation: 13305

It depends what you mean by a bilingual ontology. If you want to have an ontology in which the concepts can be presented to both an English reader and a Romanian reader, but there's only one base set of concepts, then it's fairly easy. The identity of the concept is expressed as a URI, for example:

<http://example.com/ontology/animals/Dog> a owl:Class .

There's only one concept denoting dogs, but you add labels and comments that will allow the class to be presented to users in either language:

<http://example.com/ontology/animals/Doc>
  a owl:Class ;
  rdfs:label "dog"@en ;
  rdfs:label "câine"@ro ;
  rdfs:comment "Denotes the class of all dogs"@en ;
  rdfs:comment "Denotă clasa tuturor câinilor"@ro .

Apologies for the Romanian - it was from Google Translate. I hope it makes sense! I don't use Protege, but you should be able to add labels and comments in multiple languages - it's a basic facility in RDF.

If, on the other hand, you want to have one ontology that contains concepts drawn from both languages, that can be harder. I don't know Romanian (see above!), so I don't know if this is the case or not, but some languages conceptualise the world in quite different ways, so defining a single ontology that merges concepts from both world-views can be difficult. It's also the case that, while RDF and OWL use UTF-8 as their base encoding, you may find some tools that aren't comfortable processing URI's that contain characters outside of US ASCII. That shouldn't be the case in theory, but you might want to be careful just in case.

Upvotes: 3

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