Semantic Abstraction Layer (SAL) An indirection layer to solve semantic ambiguities and multilinguality problems

Data modeling tools have always relied on linguistic labels to build models. Especially when designing ontologies, the concepts and their relationships should exist in an abstract (conceptual) level above the linguistic level. We further think that this problem is a crosscutting concern in modeling that could be solved in all modeling tools by an using an indirection layer. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Semantic Abstraction Layer (SAL). The Semantic Abstraction Layer is our theoretical solution to recurrent semantic and linguistic problems. We then very briefly introduce the Virtual Language Framework (VLF), which is our concrete implementation of the SAL. The VLF is described in more detail in a following position paper.