Polyglot

Polyglot is a simple solution to the issues of multi-lingual ontologies. It was mostly developed as a mechanism for exploring the programmatic nature of tawny, rather than a serious attempt to add heavy-duty multi-lingual support; never the less, we describe it here as it may be useful for simple cases.

The namespace consists of two entry points, polyglot-load-label and polyglot-create-resource. We describe it use with the tawny pizza ontology. First, after creating an existing resource, provide a form to generate an outline resources file.

(tawny.polyglot/polyglot-create-resource
    "src/pizza/pizzalabel_it.properties")

This is created in the src directory so that it will be versioned along with the rest of the source code. The file name can be anything you wish, although we have used a standard form here. The file created will look something like this:

AnchoviesTopping=
ArtichokeTopping=
AsparagusTopping=

The Clojure identifiers are used as keys; note this means polyglot will only work with entities present in the namespace. This function will overwrite any existing file, so in practice it is likely only to called from the repl.

Labels are loaded using a similar command, put including an language code, which is used directly in the OWL API.

(tawny.polyglot/polyglot-load-label
  "pizza/pizzalabel_it.properties" "it")

This command issues warnings about any missing labels. Although it was designed to operate over ontologies defined using the tawny language, in could be used over an ontology read from an OWL file also.