Online consultation on the SEMIC.EU Multilingualism Study

Source: ePracice.eu

A study on multilingualism has been published by the Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe (SEMIC.EU) in January 2009. In order to collect stakeholders’ opinions and to help shaping SEMIC.EU’s future approaches to multilingual issues, a public online consultation has been launched.

The SEMIC.EU Study on Multilingualism describes efficient ways to deal with multilingual data exchange and argues that pivot mappings are the key to preserving meaning. The study can be summarised as follows:

Interoperability in a multilingual environment:

• How should multilingualism be incorporated in Semantic Interoperability Assets?
• How should pan-European federated applications be interconnected?

The SEMIC.EU Study on Mulitilingualism argues that any mapping between different languages should be performed by using pivot mapping and appropriate mapping languages.

English as a pivot language:

All data exchanged as well as the defining artefacts within a Semantic Interoperability Asset should be available in the pivot language accepted by all partners. Usually, English is used as the pivot language in the context of the European Union. It is highly advisable to widely use the pivot language, e.g. for identifiers, in technical artefacts like XML schemata, etc. The pivot mapping reduces the number of mappings.

Schema Mapping and Controlled Vocabularies:

This approach exploits two elementary mapping techniques. Schema mapping, on the one hand, can be used for structural changes and is a syntactic method to solve semantic issues. The usage of controlled vocabularies, on the other hand, requires more sophisticated techniques such as taxonomies, multilingual thesauri, or ontologies. These techniques offer powerful means to translate terms on a semantic level superior to pure machine translations.

Further information:
SEMIC.EU Website – Multilingualism section
ePractice Library – EU: SEMIC.EU Study on Multilingualism
Direct link to the online consultation on the Multilingualism Study