PMKI: an European Commission action for the interoperability, maintainability and sustainability of Language Resources

The paper presents the Public Multilingual Knowledge Management Infrastructure (PMKI) action launched by the European Commission (EC) to promote the Digital Single Market in the European Union (EU). PMKI aims to share maintainable and sustainable Language Resources making them interoperable in order to support language technology industry, and public administrations, with multilingual tools able to improve cross border accessibility of digital services. The paper focuses on the main feature (interoperability) that represents the specificity of PMKI platform distinguishing it from other existing frameworks. In particular it aims to create a set of tools and facilities, based on Semantic Web technologies, to establish semantic interoperability between multilingual lexicons. Such task requires to harmonize in general multilingual language resources using standardised representation with respect to a defined core data model under an adequate architecture. A comparative study among the main data models for representing lexicons and recommendations for the PMKI service was required as well. Moreover, synergies with other programs of the EU institutions, as far as systems interoperability and Machine Translation (MT) solutions, are foreseen. For instance some interactions are foreseen between PMKI and MT service provided by the EC but also with other NLP applications.