Ontology Localization

International organizations (e.g., FAO, WHO, etc.) are increasingly expressing the need for multilingual ontologies for different purposes, e.g., ontology-based multilingual machine translation, multilingual information retrieval. However, most of the ontologies built so far have mainly English or another natural language as basis. Since multilingual ontology building is a very expensive and time-consuming undertaking, we propose methods for guiding users in the localization of ontologies, and provide tools for supporting the process. The main contributions of this paper are: i) the description of a generic Ontology Localization Activity and a methodology for guiding in the localization of ontologies; ii) the description of a tool built according to the guidelines proposed for an automatic localization of ontologies; and iii) a set of experiments used to evaluate the methodological and technological aspects of the Ontology Localization Activity.