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Top1 Introduction
Semantic Web is a modern technology aimed to deal with up-to-date challenges of the web caused by data explosion and a constant growth of the number of internet users. It was proposed as an extension of a classical web which can supply data with unambiguous meanings and, thus, make the meaning of the provided information machine-readable. Semantic Web technologies aim to enable a better and easier data exchange between otherwise heterogeneous systems and applications as well as facilitate the interaction between the users and computers.
Nowadays, new challenges for the Semantic Web technologies are posted by the process of globalization and the necessity to deal with multilingualism in the modern world. Although the World Wide Web has opened a lot of possibilities for the internet users all over the world to share and to access data, there is still a lot of space for the improvement of web applications so that they can deal properly with the linguistic and cultural variety of the users’ communities.
Although the major part (54%) of information present on the web is in English the number of non-English speakers (74.80%) using the internet is considerably increasing. Figure 1 shows the contrast of content languages for websites and internet users by language for ten major languages. This advocates an increasing demand of making the information on the web accessible for non-English-speaking audience. Moreover, the globalization of businesses makes it necessary to facilitate information exchange between linguistic and cultural communities as well. Due to the entire nature of the Semantic Web which is based on a “Bag-Of-Concepts model” instead of a “Bag-Of-Words model” applied in the classical web technology (Sorg and Cimiano 2012), it has a great potential for dealing with such a challenge.
Figure 1.
Contrast of Content Language and User Language
The importance of application’s globalization and adaptation for different linguistic and cultural settings has been recognized by many developers. E.g., Oracle whose Database applications support semantic technologies and provides a globalization support for the users. It includes an automatic adaptation of error messages, date, time, monetary and other conventions to the user’s native language and locale (Jain et al 2011, Jain and Jain 2013, 2014).
However, the Semantic Web technology still lacks a satisfactory solution for the question of representation, storage, interlinking and processing of data provided in different languages (Patel and Jain 2018, Mishra et al 2015). Although different approaches have been suggested in the recent years to incorporate multilingualism in the Semantic Web, there is still no universal solution and a lot of space for improvement remains.
The goal of this paper is to participate in the development of the Semantic Web technologies and to propose a model of a knowledge representation system adjusted to the needs of globalized Semantic Web applications. In the proposed model, the globalization of a target application implies its internationalization and further localization for any new cultural and language context.
The remainder of this work is structured as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of scientific approaches suggested in literature to handle multilingualism in Semantic Web. Section 3 establishes the scope of this work; it specifies the goals and objectives, highlights benefits of the proposed framework, and introduces tools and methods used in course of this work for a prototype implementation. Section 4 gives an in-depth description of the suggested knowledge representation system together with an overall final application architecture; It represents a manual for the usage of the suggested system architecture, it includes information on development and further extension of a corresponding final application. Section 5 describes the prototype application implemented in the domain of biodiversity in course of this work. Section 6 poses conclusions and formulates suggestions for further development and improvement of the proposed model.