An Open and Scalable Framework for Enriching Ontologies with Natural Language Content

Knowledge Sharing is a crucial issue in the Semantic Web: SW services expose and share knowledge content which arise from distinct languages, locales, and personal perspectives; a great effort has been spent in these years, in the form of Knowledge Representation standards and communication protocols, with the objective of acquiring semantic consensus across distributed applications. However, neither ontology mapping algorithm nor knowledge mediator agent can easily find a way through ontologies as they are organized nowadays: concepts expressed by hardly recognizable labels, lexical ambiguity represented by phenomena like synonymy and polysemy and use of different natural languages which derive from different cultures, all together push for expressing ontological content in a linguistically motivated fashion. This paper presents our approach in establishing a framework for semi-automatic linguistic enrichment of ontologies, which led to the development of Ontoling, a plug-in for the popular ontology development tool Protégé. We describe here its features and design aspects which characterize its current release.