The following article provides an introductory overview of the different research domains (computational linguistics, termino graphy, artificial intelligence (AI), philosophy and database semantics) for which ontologies and the emerging field of the Semantic Web have become a main point of interest. It will be pointed out that each of these domains uses a different definition for an ontology. A specific ontology engineering methodology (VUB STAR Lab DOGMA) will be presented and emphasis will be put on the specific role and contribution of (multilingual) terminography in this ontology. In addition, we will explain what ontologies might offer to advance the state of the art of linguistics and terminography.

In this paper we report on the Flemish-Dutch Agency for Human Language Technologies (HLT Agency or TST-Centrale in Dutch) in the Low Countries. We present its activities in its first decade of existence. The main goal of the HLT Agency is to ensure the sustainability of linguistic resources for Dutch. 10 years after its inception, the HLT Agency faces new challenges and opportunities. An important contextual factor is the rise of the infrastructure networks and proliferation of resource centres. We summarise some lessons learnt and we propose as future work to define and build for Dutch (which by extension can apply to any national language) a set of Basic LAnguage Infrastructure SErvices (BLAISE). As a conclusion, we state that the HLT Agency, also by its peculiar institutional status, has fulfilled and still is fulfilling an important role in maintaining Dutch as a digitally fully fledged functional language.

Since 1999, the Dutch Language Union (NTU) fosters the exchange of plans and policy initiatives amongst government officials of Flanders and the Netherlands on human language technology for Dutch (HLTD). One of the outcomes is the STEVIN R&D programme for HLTD, coordinated by the NTU and funded by the Flemish and Dutch governments. STEVIN is an example of successful joint research programming. Its set-up, highlights and scientific results are presented as well as an outlook to future initiatives.

The book provides an overview of more than a decade of joint R&D efforts in the Low Countries on HLT for Dutch. It not only presents the state of the art of HLT for Dutch in the areas covered, but, even more importantly, a description of the resources (data and tools) for Dutch that have been created are now available for both academia and industry worldwide. The contributions cover many areas of human language technology (for Dutch): corpus collection (including IPR issues) and building (in particular one corpus aiming at a collection of 500M word tokens), lexicology, anaphora resolution, a semantic network, parsing technology, speech recognition, machine translation, text (summaries) generation, web mining, information extraction, and text to speech to name the most important ones. The book also shows how a medium-sized language community (spanning two territories) can create a digital language infrastructure (resources, tools, etc.) as a basis for subsequent R&D. At the same time, it bundles contributions of almost all the HLT research groups in Flanders and the Netherlands, hence offers a view of their recent research activities. Targeted readers are mainly researchers in human language technology, in particular those focusing on Dutch. It concerns researchers active in larger networks such as the CLARIN, META-NET, FLaReNet and participating in conferences such as ACL, EACL, NAACL, COLING, RANLP, CICling, LREC, CLIN and DIR (both in the Low Countries), InterSpeech, ASRU, ICASSP, ISCA, EUSIPCO, CLEF, TREC, etc. In addition, some chapters are interesting for human language technology policy makers and even for science policy makers in general.

The term ‘academy’, originating from Greek antiquity, implies a strong mark of quality and excellence in higher education and research that is upheld by its members. In the ten past editions, the OTM Academy has yearly innovated its way of working to uphold its mark of quality and excellence. OTMA Ph.D. students students publish their work in a highly reputed publication channel, namely the Springer LNCS OTM workshops proceedings. The OTMA faculty members, who are well-respected researchers and practitioners, critically reflect on the students’ work in a positive and inspiring atmosphere, so that the students learn to improve not only their research capacities but also their presentation and writing skills. OTMA participants learn how to review scientific papers. They also enjoy ample possibilities to build and expand their professional network thanks to access to all OTM conferences and workshops. And last but not least, an ECTS credit certificate rewards their hard work.

In the context of a business process modelling task within a government department, an adapted version of the first two steps of fact oriented modelling has been proposed as an alternative strategy in the initial stage of business processes knowledge elicitation activities. As expertise and knowledge on organisational processes and procedures are in many cases implicit and embodied by support staff – rather than by highly skilled knowledge workers – it is extremely important to adopt an more accessible method to facilitate the elicitation and validation steps. This paper presents how a small scale experiment has been set up, its results and lessons learnt. Even if a thorough evaluation was out of scope, the experiment sufficiently demonstrated the strength of the analysis by natural language as included in the fact oriented modelling methodology.

In this paper we report on the past evaluation of the joint Flemish-Dutch STEVIN programme in the field of HLT for Dutch (HLTD). STEVIN was a 11.4 M euro programme on HLT for Dutch that was jointly organised and financed by the Flemish and Dutch governments. The aim was to provide academia and industry with basic building blocks for a linguistic infrastructure for the Dutch language. An independent evaluation has been carried out. The evaluators concluded that the most important targets of the STEVIN programme have been achieved to a very high extent. In this paper, we summarise the context, the resulting resources and the highlights of the STEVIN final evaluation.

The term ‘academy’, originating from Greek antiquity, implies a strong mark of quality and excellence in higher education and research that is upheld by its members. This label is equally valid in our context. OTMA Ph.D. students get the opportunity of publishing in a highly reputed publication channel, namely the Springer LNCS OTM workshops proceedings. The OTMA faculty members, who are well-respected researchers and practitioners, critically reflect on the students work in a highly positive and inspiring atmosphere, so that the students can improve not only their research capacities but also their presentation and writing skills. OTMA participants also learn how to review scientific papers. And they enjoy ample possibilities to build and expand their professional network. This includes personal feedback and exclusive time of prominent experts on-site. In addition, thanks to an OTMA LinkedIn-group the students can stay in touch with all OTMA participants and interested researchers. And last but not least, an ECTS credit certificate rewards their hard work.

This chapter describes how the Dutch-Flemish Human Language Technology Agency (HLT Agency, TST-Centrale in Dutch) takes care of the STEVIN results, after completion of the projects. The HLT Agency is a central repository for mainly government-funded digital Dutch language resources (LRs). Details on how the HLT Agency acquires, manages, maintains and distributes the LRs developed within the STEVIN programme are provided. In addition, the role played by the HLT Agency in advising STEVIN projects on intellectual property rights (IPR) issues and in facilitating the LR transfer process is also described. Attention is then paid to the licensing, pricing and IPR policies, which are necessary to guarantee the sustainability and availability of LRs for research, education and commercial purposes. Thanks to STEVIN, the HLT Agency has become a linchpin of the Dutch-Flemish HLT community.

In 1999, the Dutch Language Union, a binational intergovernmental organisation has created the HLT Platform as a means to start an exchange of plans and policy initiatives amongst government officials of Flanders and the Netherlands concerning human language technology for Dutch. During the past decade, the cooperation between these partners has intensified over time and culminated in the definition and execution of a joint R&D programme, called STEVIN. This paper summarises the past decade of (major) HLTD policy initiatives that led to the creation of the STEVIN in the Low Countries. It sketches the institutional framework in which the STEVIN-programme flourished. In addition, it provides the main conclusions of the evaluation the STEVIN programme. The external evaluators qualified the programme as successful.

A model driven architecture combined with SBVR and fact oriented modelling are key standards and methodologies used to implement a Flemish research information government portal. The portal will in the future offer various services to researchers, research related organistions and policy makers.

The Flemish public administration aims to integrate and publish all research information on a portal. Information is currently stored according to the CERIF standard modeled in (E)ER and aimed at extensibility. Solutions exist to easily publish data from databases in RDF, but ontologies need to be constructed to render those meaningful. In order to publish their data, the public administration and other stakeholders first need to agree on a shared understanding of what exactly is captured and stored in that format. In this paper, we show how the use of the Business Semantics Management method and tool contributed in achieving that aim.

“A good beginning is half way to success” is what a Chinese proverb teaches. Hence, the OTM Academy offers our next-generation researchers far more than other doctoral symposiums usually do. OTMA PhD students get the opportunity to publish in a highly reputed publication channel, namely, the Springer LNCS OTM workshops proceedings. The OTMA faculty members, who are well-respected researchers and practitioners, critically reflect on the students’ work in a highly positive and inspiring atmosphere, so that the students can improve not only their research capacities but also their presentation and writing skills. OTMA participants also learn how to review scientific papers. And they enjoy ample possibilities to build and expand their professional network. This includes dedicated personal feedback and exclusive time of prominent experts on-site. In addition, thanks to an OTMA LinkedIn group, the students can stay in touch with all OTMA participants and interested researchers. And last but not least, an ECTS credit certificate rewards their hard work.

We are very happy to organise the 7th OTM Academy (OTMA), the workshop for coaching promising PhD students. OTMA PhD students get the opportunity of publishing in a highly reputed publication channel, namely the Springer LNCS OTM workshops proceedings.

Ontology evaluation is a labour intensive and laborious job. Hence, it is relevant to investigate automated methods. But before an automated ontology evaluation method is considered reliable and consistent, it must be validated by human experts. In this paper we want to present a meta-analysis of an automated ontology evaluation procedure as it has been applied in earlier tests. It goes without saying that many of the principles touched upon can be applied in the context of ontology evaluation as such, irrespective of it being automated or not. Consequently, the overall quality of an ontology is not only determined by the quality of the artifact itself, but also by the the quality of its evaluation method. Providing an analysis on the set-up and conditions under which an evaluation of an ontology takes place can only be beneficial to the entire domain of ontology engineering.

In the last decade, the Dutch Language Union has taken a serious interest in digital language resources and human language technologies (HLT), because they are crucial for a language to be able to survive in the information society. In this paper we report on the current state of the joint Flemish-Dutch efforts in the field of HLT for Dutch (HLTD) and how follow-up activities are being prepared. We explain the overall mechanism of evaluating an R&D programme and the role of evaluation in the policy cycle to establish new R&D funding activities. This is applied to the joint Flemish-Dutch STEVIN programme. Outcomes of the STEVIN scientific midterm review are shortly discussed as the overall final evaluation is currently still on-going. As part of preparing for future policy plans, an HLTD forecast is presented. Also new opportunities are outlined, in particular in the context of the European CLARIN infrastructure project that can lead to new avenues for joint Flemish-Dutch cooperation on HLTD.

The knowledge economy is one of the cornerstones of our society. Knowledge unlocks innovation, which in turns spawns new products or services, thereby enabling further economic growth. Hence, an information system unlocking scientific technical knowledge is an important asset for government policy and strategic decisions by industry. In this paper, some pilot experiments are presented on how business semantics man- agement and related tools are applied to set up a syntactically and semantically stable conceptual modelling environment that caters for an easy and flexible extension of conceptual models by non tech-savvy domain experts. The context of the FRIS serves as use case for initial experiments. Even if such an endeavour is shown to be feasible - and leading to cost reduction - many hurdles - in particular data quality control at the input source - still need to be overcome.

Evaluation of ontologies is increasingly becoming important as the number of available ontologies is steadily growing. Ontology evaluation is a labour intensive and laborious job. Hence, the need grows to come up with automated methods for ontology evaluation. In this paper, we report on experiments using a light-weight automated ontology evaluation procedure (called EvaLexon) developed earlier. The experiments are meant to test if the automated procedure can detect an improvement (or deterioration) in the quality of an ontology miner's output. Four research questions have been formulated on how to compare two rounds of ontology mining and how to assess the potential differences in quality between the rounds. The entire set-up and software infrastructure remain identical during the two rounds of ontology mining and evaluation. The main difference between the two rounds is the upfront manual removal by two human experts separately of irrelevant passages from the text corpus. Ideally, the EvaLexon procedure evaluates the ontology mining results in a similar way as the human experts do. The experiments show that the automated evaluation procedure is sensitive enough to detect a deterioration of the miner output quality. However, this sensitivity cannot be reliably qualified as similar to the behaviour of human experts as the latter seem to disagree themselves largely on which passages (and triples) are relevant or not. Novel ways of organising community-based ontology evaluation might be an interesting avenue to explore in order to cope with disagreements between evaluating experts.