Is lemon Sufficient for Building Multilingual Ontologies for Bantu Languages?

The current enormous amount of data on the Semantic Web and its increasing uptake raises the question of how this data can be accessed in several languages. OWL provides limited support for multilingualism through the use of an annotation property. However, it is known that more expressive models are required for linguistically demanding applications. Among the possible solutions, Lexicon Model for Ontologies (lemon) enables associating linguistic information with ontology elements by separating the lexical from the ontological layer. This paper investigates whether lemon is sufficient for specifying multilingual ontologies for Bantu languages. Specifically, the paper: (i) identifies the requirements for building lexica in lemon format for Bantu languages; (ii) describes the results in overcoming some of the challenges, notably concerning noun classes; and (iii) presents some open issues that will have to be addressed to increase usability of lemon.