An Ontological Approach for Multicultural Digital Repositories

Abstract

The EC funded Share.TEC project aims to provide culturally aware access to resources across Europe related to Teacher Education. The semantic core of the system is the Teacher Education Ontology (TEO), which not only supports the multilingual interface but also underpins fundamental functionalities like searching and browsing. This paper describes an approach that systematically reorganizes the structure of TEO to leverage the existing multicultural dimension. Special attention is focused on representing situations where the semantics of concepts do not map completely across cultures.