Multilingual ontology merging using cross-lingual matching

With the growing amount of multilingual data on the Semantic Web, several ontologies (in different natural languages) have been developed to model the same domain. Creating multilingual ontologies by merging such monolingual ones is important to promote semantic interoperability among different ontologies in different natural languages. This is a step towards achieving the multilingual Semantic Web. In this paper, we propose MULON, an approach for merging monolingual ontologies in different natural languages producing a multilingual ontology. MULON approach comprises three modules; Preparation Module, Merging Module, and Assessment Module. We consider both classes and properties in the merging process. We present three real-world use cases describing the usability of the MULON approach in different domains. We assess the quality of the merged ontologies using a set of predefined assessment metrics. MULON has been implemented using Scala and Apache Spark under an open-source license. We have compared our cross-lingual matching results with the results from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI 2019). MULON has achieved relatively high precision, recall, and F-measure in comparison to three state-of-the-art approaches in the matching process and significantly higher coverage without any redundancy in the merging process.