Multilingualism in Ontologies

The unavoidable symbiosis between ontologies andnatural language has proven more and more relevant onthe light of the growing interest and application ofSemantic Web technologies. Ontologies that arewell-documented in a natural language not onlyprovide humans with a better understanding of theworld model they represent, but also a betterexploitation by the systems that may use them. In thecurrent scenario of the Semantic Web, ontologies areproduced by users all over the world and consumed byapplications that interoperate with texts indifferent natural languages. Multilingualism becomesthen a crucial issue that needs to be examined atseveral stages of the ontology development process.In this work we approach multilingualism at theinitial phase of knowledge acquisition for ontologymodeling from experts, and at a later stage ofenriching the ontology with multilingual information. Both approaches aim at bringing ontologies closer toaverage users coming from different linguistic andcultural communities, being this a fundamentalrequirement for the consolidation of the Semantic Web.