A multilingual ontology framework for R&D project management systems

R&D project management systems are developed to facilitate the efficient management of R&D projects in government-funding agencies and universities. They should support R&D information sharing among researchers and research administrators from different nationalities using different languages. This paper presents an ontology-based methodology to the development of R&D project management systems with multilingual supports. In particular, a multilingual ontology is proposed, which consists of domain model, application model, user model and linguistic model. The methodology is used in the development of an R&D project management system for the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong SAR Government. The system supports three languages and facilitates R&D information sharing among users with different culture backgrounds and usage preferences.