Facilitating Non-expert Users of the KYOTO Platform: the TMEKO Editing Protocol for Synset to Ontology Mappings

This paper presents the general architecture of the TMEKO protocol (Tutoring Methodology for Enriching the Kyoto Ontology) that guides non-expert users through the process of creating mappings from domain wordnet synsets to a shared ontology by answering natural language questions. TMEKO will be part of a Wiki-like community platform currently developed in the Kyoto project (http://www.kyoto-project.eu). The platform provides the architecture for ontology based fact mining to enable knowledge sharing across languages and cultures. A central part of the platform is the Wikyoto editing environment in which users can create their own domain wordnet for seven different languages and define relations to the central and shared ontology based on DOLCE. A substantial part of the mappings will involve important processes and qualities associated with the concept. Therefore, the TMEKO protocol provides specific interviews for creating complex mappings that go beyond subclass and equivalence relations. The Kyoto platform and the TMEKO protocol are developed and applied to the environment domain for seven different languages (English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Japanese and Chinese), but can easily be extended and adapted to other languages and domains.