A collaborative Platform for multilingual Ontology Development

The world is extremely diverse and its diversity is obvious in the cultural differences and the large number of spoken languages being used all over the world. In this sense, we need to collect and organize a huge amount of knowledge obtained from multiple resources differing from one another in many aspects. A possible approach for doing that is to think of designing effective tools for construction and maintenance of linguistic resources and localized domain ontologies based on well-defined knowledge representation methodologies capable of dealing with diversity and the continuous evolvement of human knowledge. In this thesis, we present a collaborative platform which allows for knowledge organization in a language-independent manner and provides the appropriate mapping from a language independent concept to one specific lexicalization per language. This representation ensures a smooth multilingual enrichment process for linguistic resources and a robust construction of ontologies using language-independent concepts. The collaborative platform is designed following a workflow-based development methodology that models linguistic resources as a set of collaborative objects and assigns a customizable workflow to build and maintain each collaborative object in a community driven manner, with extensive support of modern web 2.0 social and collaborative features.