Representing and Aligning Similar Relations: Parts and Wholes in isiZulu vs. English

Ontology-enabled medical information systems are used in Sub-Saharan Africa, which require localisation of Semantic Web technologies, such as ontology verbalisation, yet keeping a link with the English language-based systems. In realising this, we zoom in on the partwhole relations that are ubiquitous in medical ontologies, and the isiZulu language. The analysis of part-whole relations in isiZulu revealed both ‘underspecification’—therewith also challenging the transitivity claim— and three refinements cf. the list of common part-whole relations. This was first implemented for the monolingual scenario so that it generates structured natural language from an ontology in isiZulu. Two new natural language-independent correspondence patterns are proposed to solve non-1:1 object property alignments, which are subsequently used to align the part-whole taxonomies informed by the two languages.