Semantic Interoperability of Multilingual Language Resources by Automatic Mapping P. Schmitz ◦ , E. Francesconi ◦† , N. Hajlaoui ◦ , B. Batouche ◦ , A. Stellato + ◦ Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg † Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of CNR (ITTIG-CNR), Italy + Dept. of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy enrico.francesconi@publications.europa.eu francesconi@ittig.cnr.it Abstract. The PMKI project is an European Commission action aim- ing to create a public multilingual knowledge management infrastructure to support e-commerce solutions in a multilingual environment. Such in- frastructure will consist in a set of tools able to create interoperability between multilingual classification systems (like thesauri) and other lan- guage resources, so that they can be easily accessible through a Web dissemination platform and reusable by small and medium-sized enter- prises (SMEs), as well as by public administrations. In this paper the standards used to represent language resources and a methodology for automatic mapping between thesauri, based on an information retrieval framework, are presented. Keywords: Semantic Interoperability, Language Resources, Information Re- trieval, Semantic Mapping, Ontolex-Lemon 1 Introduction Language barriers in the EU make the European market fragmented and decrease its economic potential. Particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are currently at a disadvantage compared to big companies to approach Euro- pean and global markets for the high cost of providing multilingual services. The EU institutions aim to overcome language obstacles and increase cross-border e-commerce by building open multilingual tools and features free of charge. For this reason the European Commission, through the ISA 2 program 1 , launched a pilot project on creating a public multilingual knowledge management infrastructure (PMKI project). It is aimed to support e-commerce solutions in a multilingual environment by creating a set of tools, based on semantic Web tech- nologies, to facilitate the development of multilingual facilities able to improve cross border accessibility of digital services and e-commerce solutions. In practi- cal terms, overcoming language barriers on the Web means creating multilingual 1 ISA2: Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens (https://ec.europa.eu/isa2/home en)