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Investigating the universality of a semantic web-upper ontology in the context of the African languages
Abstract
Ontologies are foundational to, and upper ontologies provide semantic integration across, the Semantic Web. Multilingualism has been shown to be a key challenge to the development of the Semantic Web, and is a particular challenge to the universality requirement of upper ontologies. Universality implies a qualitative mapping from lexical ontologies, like WordNet, to an upper ontology, such as SUMO. Are a given natural language family's core concepts currently included in an existing, accepted upper ontology? Does SUMO preserve an ontological non-bias with respect to the multilingual challenge, particularly in the context of the African languages? The approach to developing WordNets mapped to shared core concepts in the non-Indo-European language families has highlighted these challenges and this is examined in a unique new context: the Southern African languages. This is achieved through a new mapping from African language core concepts to SUMO. It is shown that SUMO has no signi ficant natural language ontology bias.ComputingM. Sc. (Computer Science- Dissertation
- Upper Ontology
- Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO)
- Tree comparison
- Ontology
- Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- Lexical semantics
- Semantic networks
- Language resources
- Open environment
- WordNet
- Extensible Mark-up Language (XML)
- African languages of Sub-Saharan Origin
- Proto-Bantu language
- 401.430285
- Linguistic universals
- Semantic Web
- Semantics -- Data processing
- Ontologies (Information retrieval)
- Document markup languages
- Proto-Bantu language
- RDF (Document markup language)