New Method for Building Multilingual Ontologies
http://www.fi.upm.es/?pagina=737&idioma=english
“Researchers from the Validation and Business Applications Group based at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) have developed a new method for building multilingual ontologies that can be applied to the Semantic Web.”
So ontologies are the cool thing to be developing these days given the promise of the Semantic web looming over us. But up until yesterday, a big limitation with ontologies was that they were relatively single-minded when it came to language. “The application of ontologies to the Internet comes up against serious problems triggered by linguistic breadth and diversity. This diversity stands in the way of users making intelligent use of the web.”
People have tried to bridge the gap, but strategies like expert-based terminology (ahem, Svenonius, ahem) and using one language as the “pivot”, have failed miserably. But these researchers claim to have created a method for building ontologies IRRESPECTIVE of language. And their secret weapons appear to be universal words and the assumption that “any text has implicit ontological relations that can be extracted by analysing certain grammatical structures of the sentences making up the text“. (I mean, I could’ve told them that, but whatever)
Interesting stuff, and will probably be even more interesting when I finally grasp what an ontology actually is. 
(just kidding) (sort of)
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