Denis Dechandon

Biography

Experienced tool and business manager with a demonstrated history of working in in the government administration industry. His studies and professional activities focus on multilingualism, linguistics, translation, natural language processing and foreign languages, as well as semantic technologies, interoperability, knowledge organisation system creation and maintenance, and process automation. In his current position at the Publications Office of the European Union, enhancing the semantic interoperability, enlarging the use of semantic technologies and supporting government administrations and national public services for creating, maintaining, enhancing and disseminating semantic assets and tools are at the very heart of the activities of the Sector he is in charge of.

Talks and Events

2022 Tutorial: Build on synergies and share standards and technologies to boost your knowledge organisation systems and language resources

The European Union is characterised by the use of 24 official languages. Their harmonious co-existence provides fuel to democracy, transparency and accountability. While it is clear that multilingual language resources support oral and written communication for the benefit of some 447 million citizens, multilingualism is an example of good practice in the creation and maintenance of knowledge organisation systems and reference data lists. To this end, a closer collaboration of the corresponding professional communities is to be supported and facilitated. As such, we need to make sure that professionals in the linguistic fields and their counterparts in the semantic web and information and knowledge management fields work hand-in-hand whenever necessary.

The Publications Office of the European Union contributes to the effort through, among others, the provision of an access to two open source semantic applications developed in the framework of the ISA² programme and, from now on, the Digital Europe Programme: VocBench and ShowVoc. They both ease the multilingual and collaborative creation, maintenance, sharing and visualisation of language resources and knowledge organisation systems. Consequently, both professional communities can build on the same tools and technologies, while benefiting from specialised knowledge enhancing the quality, multilingualism and impact of their work in today’s societies, organisations and companies.

This tutorial will cover a presentation and demo of both applications focusing on their multilingual features, a description of the collaborative work done on knowledge organisation systems and terminology assets, and the aims of such a collaboration. Besides, it will provide the opportunity to present a forthcoming additional tool that will process and manage unstructured information (e.g. text, various kind of media) and elicit knowledge out of it, in the form of structured information modelled according to target ontology vocabularies.

Hand-on exercises will be proposed to participants.