TO-MULTILONTOLOGY & MPCO: A METHODOLOGY FOR DEVELOPING MULTILINGUAL ONTOLOGIES & A LEGAL ONTOLOGY OF THE PENAL CODE

Ontologies are among the techniques introduced by artificial intelligence in the early 1990s to enable better organization and semantic representation of information. They have the potential to play a crucial role in the design of question-answering systems and content comprehension by organizing and structuring the data they present. Multilingual ontologies are both language-independent and capable of supporting multiple languages, offering significant potential for querying and understanding knowledge in multicultural and multilingual environments. Although several ontology development methodologies exist, they provide the necessary elements for ontology construction without clearly demonstrating how to implement them or specifying the models to guide the development process, particularly for multilingual ontologies. Indeed, existing methodologies summarize the development of ontologies as a mere enumeration of important terms, followed by the definition of classes and their hierarchy, the definition of properties and their facets, and finally the creation of instances—without showing users the approach or method that could guide them in choosing terms, defining classes, the hierarchy, and properties, or in demonstrating how to build multilingual ontologies. In addition, there is a lack of models that allow for representing ontology data in a way that guides its development and documentation. This article proposes a customized methodology, TO-MULTILONTOLOGY, which covers aspects from the specification phase to the validation and evaluation phase, offering a detailed implementation process with clearly defined steps to guide and simplify the task of building multilingual ontologies. The proposed methodology also addresses one of the main obstacles to effective knowledge sharing: the inadequate documentation of existing ontologies. It provides powerful tools and models that not only document the ontology but also guide its development. This methodology will be explained and applied in the development of a multilingual legal ontology, MPCO (Multilingual Penal Code Ontology), in French and Arabic, for the Moroccan government's Penal Code. The constructed ontology can play a significant role in information retrieval and in learning about the penal code. It can also serve as a reference for the development of similar penal law ontologies.