We present AΜAΛΘΕΙA (AMALTHIA), an application ontology that models the domain of dishes as they are presented in 112 menus collected from restaurants/taverns/patisseries in East Macedonia and Thrace in Northern Greece. AΜAΛΘΕΙA supports a tourist mobile application offering multilingual translation of menus, dietary and cultural information about the dishes and their ingredients, as well as information about the geographical dispersion of the dishes. In this document, we focus on the food/dish dimension that constitutes the ontology’s backbone. Its dish-oriented perspective differentiates AΜAΛΘΕΙA from other food ontologies and thesauri, such as Langual, enabling it to codify information about the dishes served, particularly considering the fact that they are subject to wide variation due to the inevitable evolution of recipes over time, to geographical and cultural dispersion, and to the chef’s creativity. We argue for the adopted design decisions by drawing on semantic information retrieved from the menus, as well as other social and commercial facts, and compare AMAΛΘΕΙA with other important taxonomies in the food field. To the best of our knowledge, AΜAΛΘΕΙA is the first ontology modeling (i) dish variation and (ii) Greek (commercial) cuisine (a component of the Mediterranean diet).

We report on the ongoing development of IDION, a web resource of richly documented multiword expressions (MWEs) of Modern Greek addressed to the human user and to NLP. IDION contains about 2000 verb MWEs (VMWEs) of which about 850 have been documented as regards their syntactic flexibility, their semantics and the semantic relations with other VMWEs. Sets of synonymous MWEs are defined in a bottom-up manner revealing the conceptual organisation of the MG VMWE domain.

In the course of developing facilities for integrating cultural heritage in the everyday education practice, highly structured information was retrieved from both the structured and the unstructured Europeana documentation contributed by the Greek cultural institutions (~480K entries); Modern Greek is the working language. Satisfactory results were obtained by using in-house developed medium sized Getty/AAT compatible vocabularies and simple heuristics. The paper reports on the development of controlled vocabularies and the retrieval of structured information from the unstructured Europeana documentation. Retrieval results show the importance of controlled vocabularies and thesauri as regards the exploitation of digital library content.

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