C3LSW 2012 - The 2nd Workshop on Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Semantic Web (C3LSW’12)

This workshop is a follow up workshop to the C3LSW2010 held in conjunction with the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2010). The C3LSW2012 is being held this year in conjunction with the 2012 World Intelligence Congress (WIC2012) and is intended to provide a forum to share and discuss innovative ideas approaches in ontology, agent and Semantic Web research in areas related to the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues of the multilingual Semantic Web. The issues discussed will not only be relevant and timely to WIC2012 participants, but also of much urgency, because the exponential growth non-English-speaking users of the Web and thus the Semantic Web. This urgency becomes apparent as most known written languages become part of the Web and as the rapid penetration rate of the Web users to over 25% of the World population, most of which speak a language other than English, so far the lingua franca of the Web, requires that we pay close attention to the potential issues that might arise from a multilingual and multicultural Semantic Web. We have barely scratched the surface of the Semantic Web with languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian and Arabic, which as of 2010 together account for about 773.7million users or about 34.2% of the total 2.1 billion Internet users . As the multilingual Web use increases, new approaches to enable the realization of the multilingual Semantic Web become even more important. This workshop is intended to for researchers and practicioners who are working on novel approaches to address the theoretical and practical issues related not only to lexical-to-conceptual mappings of natural language to ontologies, but also to a variety of non-linguistic issues, both from the scientific and engineering points of view.
Workshop Objective
One of the important topics of the workshop, is how to map language-dependent lexica to language-independent ontologies, to enable cross-lingual and cross-cultural querying and presentation of query results across multiple and diverse languages. The increasing use of nonnative languages on the Web can be insightfully compared with the development of interlingue by second language learners. Moreover, the successful implementation of the multilingual Semantic Web across multiple languages and cultures requires novel approaches to address the theoretical and practical issues related, not only to the mappings of natural language lexica to conceptual ontologies, but also to a variety of other factors peculiar to cultures and their spoken languages. Just as internationalization and localization do not simply consist of translation of interface components, but also of careful cross-cultural and cross-functional consideration to the cultural sensitivities of the intended source and target languages, similar considerations should be given to those issues in the realization of the multilingual Semantic Web.
Moreover, these issues transcend linguistic and cultural aspects as they affect functional implementation of software components, specifically intelligent software agents, which must inevitably cross language and cultural boundaries when querying and performing reasoning across ontologies developed under the many linguistic and cultural biases possible in a multilingual Semantic Web. Some questions that come to mind are: Do we need to adapt agent designs, to accommodate for the multi-linguistic and/or multi-cultural boundaries, which agents must inevitable cross to gather knowledge on which to perform reasoning? If so, do we also need to adapt agent communication and negotiation policies for agents collaborating from across these boundaries? Can we learn from and therefore generalize these policies from the inter-linguistic and multi-cultural negotiations that take place in multi-cultural societies?
The objective of this workshop is to serve as a forum for sharing the most recent efforts and experiences in this area, disseminating the current best practices and discussing the directions that the field should take.