Matching multi-lingual subject vocabularies

Most libraries and other cultural heritage institutions use controlled knowledge organisation systems, such as thesauri, to describe their collections. Unfortunately, as most of these institutions use different such systems, unified access to heterogeneous collections is difficult. Things are even worse in an international context when concepts have labels in different languages. In order to overcome the multilingual interoperability problem between European Libraries, extensive work has been done to manually map concepts from different knowledge organisation systems, which is a tedious and expensive process.

Within the TELplus project, we developed and evaluated methods to automatically discover these mappings, using different ontology matching techniques. In experiments on major French, English and German subject heading lists Rameau, LCSH and SWD, we show that we can automatically produce mappings of surprisingly good quality, even when using relatively naive translation and matching methods.