Using web tools for constructing an ontology of different natural languages

Abstract

Ontologies, often defined as an explicit specification of conceptualization, are necessary for knowledge representation and knowledge exchange. This means that ontology describes concepts and relations that exist in a domain. To enable knowledge exchange, it is necessary to describe these concepts and relations in a better way than just ordering them in taxonomy. A computational ontology consists of a number of different components, such as Concepts, Instances, Individuals or Facts, Relations and Attributes. The present research is intended to consider different software tools related to Semantic web, and achieve a kind of comparison among them. In fact, five ontology-editors are described and compared. They are: Apollo, Onto Studio, Protégé, Swoop and TopBraid Composer Free Edition. The structure and basic features of these editors as well as the way of using them are described. The main criterion used in the process of comparing these editors lies in their convenience for the user, and the possibility to apply them in different kinds of application. The main goal of the work is to introduce a method for ontology construction of a certain domain in applying the Semantic web. A number of software tools adapted to build up the domain ontologies of most wide–spread natural languages are available; however accomplishing that for any given natural language presents a challenge. This research proposes a semi-automatic procedure to create ontologies for different natural languages. The approach utilizes various software tools that are available on the Internet, most notably DODDLE-OWL which is a domain ontology development tool implemented for English and Japanese languages. Through this tool, WordNet, Protégé and XSLT transformations, the researcher proposes a general procedure to construct domain ontology for any natural language.