Terminology Meets the Multilingual Semantic Web: A Semiotic Comparison of Ontologies and Terminologies

To pave the way towards a multilingual Semantic Web its resources such as ontologies need to be expressed in natural language in addition to logic. Ontologiesare primarily designed for machine-readability of knowledge and often lack natural language content required for human users.Terminology provides anestablished model to accommodate specialized language and has the potential to bridge this gap towards multilingual Semantic Web resources.In addition, the technological infrastructure and tool support for ontologies have the potential of boosting terminology formalisms.To lay the ground for their integrationa thorough comparison and multidisciplinary understanding of ontologies and terminologies is needed. This paper elaborates on their commonalities and divergences from a semiotic perspective by analyzing their main syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects. Subsequently, results of this analysis are juxtaposed and implications for an integration are presented.