Ontology mapping to support multilingual ontology-based question answering

In this paper we report results obtained by using the XeOML mapping language to harmonize two ontologies developed as a support for a multilingual, distributed question answering system for two university domains. The test bed has allowed us to test the various possibilities offered by the language to express simple and complex mappings that reflect different levels of similarities between classes and properties of the two ontologies. Inference rules were also created to expand the coverage of the initial manually defined mapping document. The non-trivial nature of the study is backed up by overall quantitative information on the nature of the mapping resource produced.