Interlingua
Originally posted as part of the CMPE58H course by Susan Üsküdarlı in the fall semester of 2022 at https://furkanakkurt5204.gitlab.io/personal/ontology/2022/12/21/interlingua.
The EuroWordNet project1 aimed to “develop a multilingual database with wordnets in several European languages”. It was started in 1996 and its project manager was Piek Vossen2. They produced wordnets for many European languages as a part of this project. The files were not open to the public and they had Euro rates per synsets.
Continuing with this idea, Mr Vossen founded the Global WordNet Association3 (GWA). GWA has the Collaborative InterLingual Index4 (CILI) which provides mappings from their generated URIs of concepts to the Princeton WordNet’s5 URIs. So these concepts can be linked to wordnets of other languages by a relation.
Example from CILI:
<i23197> a <Concept> ;
skos:definition "make neat, smart, or trim"@en ;
dc:source pwn30:00293977-v .
<i23198> a <Concept> ;
skos:definition "produce or yield flowers"@en ;
dc:source pwn30:00294245-v .
pwn30:00294245-v corresponds to this and pwn30:00293977-v corresponds to this.
The title of the blog refers to an international auxiliary language6 (IAL), probably the most widely used. IALs are constructed to be used to facilitate communication between persons of any nationality that have no common native tongues.