Towards Multilingual, Termontological Support in Ontology Engineering

More than ever before terminology as a discipline is growing into multidisciplinarity. On the one hand, it is inspired by new developments in other disciplines like computational linguistics, artificial intelligence or database management. On the other hand, it can be at the service of other disciplines. The example we would like to elaborate on is how a multilingual terminographic analysis can contribute to the quality of the output of ontology engineers. The example we will use to illustrate this is taken from the FFPOIROT project , a European research project in the 5th framework which aims at compiling for several languages (Dutch-Belgium, French-France, Italian-Italy and English-UK) a computational knowledge repository (i.e. an ontology) for the financial forensics domain. The method of termontography was developed by CVC Brussels in order to add a multilingual layer to this ontology.
This paper is structured as follows: in the first section we briefly explain some fundamental issues related to DOGMA modelling and show how our terminological resource is used by DOGMA ontology engineers in the FFPOIROT project (section 1). In the second section we elaborate on the problems that may arise when trying to match the content in our terminology resource with the ontology developed in DOGMA (section 2). In the third section we motivate the need for a framework of domain-specific categories that precedes the termontographic analysis. The fourth section summarises the termontography method and in section 5 we draw some general conclusions with respect to the integration of multilingual, termontological support in an ontology engineering framework.