Re: semiotics.owl

Thanks Elena,

On Apr 17, 2013, at 12:06:32 PM , Elena Montiel Ponsoda <elemontiel@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Aldo, John, all,
> 
> After reading Aldo's previous e-mail on "Re: Senses, synsets and ontology mapping in WordNet", I am not so sure I agree with the example provided by John in the wiki page, that is why I would like to ask you for clarification.
> 
> Example: The term 'G8' expresses the OWL Class G8Countries and denotes the set {Canada,France,Germany,Italy,Japan,Russia,US,UK}, which is conceptualized by G8Countries
> 
> I quote from Aldo's previous e-mail:
>  Re (3):
> "
> This is not the case when we want to link lexical or KOS meanings to typical ontologies, e.g. to myont:Vomit class. If Vomit is an OWL (or RDFS) class, its interpretation is *extensional* (a collection of things, vomiting events in the common interpretation), therefore it's fully justified to use ontolex:reference for representing this linking.
> Therefore:
> 	wordnet:wordsense-vomit-verb-1 wordnet:inSynset wordnet:synset-vomit-verb-1
> 	wordnet:wordsense-vomit-verb-1 ontolex:reference myont:Vomit
> 	wordnet:synset-vomit-verb-1 ontolex:reference myont:Vomit
> "
> Aldo, if I understood this correctly, the reference relation would be established between the WordNet synset or meaning and an OWL class "myont:Vomit" in an ontology. 
> Therefore,  the expression to vomit expresses the meaning (sense or synset) corresponding to that verb
>                     the meaning (sense or synset) conceptualizes an OWL (or RDFS) class
> 
> If we extrapolate this to the G8 example, we would say that the expression G8 expresses the meaning of "a group of eight of the richest industrial countries in the world...", which, in its turn, conceptualizes the OWL Class G8Countries, that contains and denotes the set of countries {Canada,France,Germany,Italy,Japan,Russia,US,UK}, as instances. 

John's example is indeed tricky (I hadn't seen that from the wiki page), because it touches another issue we had discussed in autumn, but was not in fact solved/agreed completely: an ontology entity is just an extensional object, or both an extensional and intensional one? In the example, this would be correct:

G8 semiotics:expresses [some G8 meaning] .
G8 semiotics:denotes [the set {Canada,France,Germany,Italy,Japan,Russia,US,UK}]

but John makes another move: it takes the OWL class G8Countries as a meaning. If G8Countries is taken as an intensional object, I have no problem with this move, e.g.:

G8 semiotics:expresses dbpedia:G8 (or wikipediacat:G8_nations)

However, the example chosen can be tricky also from a regular formal ontology viewpoint; in fact, G8 can be interpreted as an organization, which has certain member states, then not as a (logical) class. In this case, it's an individual that we are putting in the meaning role, which is perfectly fine.
The basic trick comes out clearly with a more typical class, e.g. myont:Vomit, or, even more typically, foaf:Person:

wordnet:word-person semiotics:expresses foaf:Person .
wordnet:word-person semiotics:denotes [the set { Adam, Eve, Lucie, … }]

On the other hand, semiotically there is nothing bad in doing what Elena suggests, i.e. to consider also glosses as meanings (the following is the FOAF comment for the class Person):

wordnet:word-person semiotics:expresses "A person" .

Peirce, the founder of modern semiotics, indicated explicitly that a meaning is simply an "interpretant", something that is used to move on during the semiotic game.
Practically speaking however, this would create some problems, e.g. semiotics:expresses is an owl:ObjectProperty, which can't be used with strings, therefore we should reify the comment to talk about it, e.g.:

wordnet:word-person semiotics:expresses _:foafPersonComment .
_:foafPersonComment myont:text "A person" .

Then we need to distinguish different kinds of meaning (=intensional objects). If I remember well, time ago I proposed to introduce an extension of OntoLex that can deal with types of meaning, at least those that seem most important to consider and to distinguish:

LexicalSense (e.g. wordnet:wordsense-vomit-verb-1)
Synset (e.g. wordnet:synset-vomit-verb-1)
Gloss (e.g. _:foafPersonComment)
LogicalConstant (e.g. foaf:Person, dbpedia:G8, myont:Vomit)
…

Until here, I think we should be able to agree. Of course, we need to indicate a default choice for the semantics of logical constants: should they be firstly treated as intensional or extensional objects? In my initial email, I was suggesting to consider them as extensional objects, therefore Elena's objection is justified, at least for the default case. This would be conservative wrt current assumption of using ontolex:reference, e.g.:

G8 ontolex:reference dbpedia:G8 .
wordnet:word-person ontolex:reference foaf:Person .

My interpretation of ontolex:reference is that it links to an extensional object, therefore:

ontolex:reference rdfs:subPropertyOf semiotics:denotes .
ontolex:sense rdfs:subPropertyOf semiotics:expresses .

But if we want to distinguish two objects out of each owl:Class, one intensional, and one extensional, then we need to model as in John's example.
I think assuming only extensionality for logical constants is probably more efficient and simple, but I do not see many problems (modulo philosophy) either in allowing an intensional treatment if needed by someone.

Aldo

> 
> I would rather agree with this view, since I my interpretation of the semiotic triangle, the "Referent" corresponds to a conceptualization or ontology of a certain world. 
> In fact, I think that if we assume this view, the LexicalEntry-Sense-OntologyClass path has more sense. Could you agree with this view?  
> 
> Best,
> Elena.
> 
> 
> 
> El 16/04/2013 20:27, Aldo Gangemi escribió:
>> Hi, John has made a nice summary of semiotics.owl, and some useful questions. John, thanks for the analysis :) 
>> Answers below.
>> 
>> On Apr 16, 2013, at 6:45:53 PM , John McCrae <jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Aldo,
>>> 
>>> I was trying to synthesize the semiotics.owl ontology you sent around. I made some notes here
>>> 
>>> http://greententacle.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~jmccrae/semiotics.owl.html
>>> 
>>> I had some things I didn't fully understand
>>> 
>>> Naming of 'reference', looking at the comments it seems to be what is (from my experience) called a 'referent' in the semiotics literature. In fact, more confusingly some authors seem to use reference for meaning. I think this has confused a lot of the OntoLex discussion as in lemon we use reference as the term for the meaning in the ontology. (Honestly this is a total accident, it was originally chosen to harmonize with LMF's 'monolingual external reference', used to cite external resources for senses).
>> 
>> I opted for "reference" because "referent" typically bears a realistic flavor in philosphical debates. Besides that, no problem in using "referent", as in the Ogden-Richards version of the triangle.
>> 
>>> 
>>> What is a manifestation, it has no annotations?
>> 
>> Right, I should add it. A Manifestation is the material occurrence of an Expression, e.g. Dante's Comedy (Expression) can be manifested in an eBook or a paper book. The same term with similar meaning is used in FRBR vocabulary.
>> 
>>> 
>>> The model has linguistic (speech?) acts, I was wondering if there were any practical examples of how to model a speech act
>> 
>> I'll add it, and yes, it's an event (type). Example: "Talleyrand said "Si cela va sans dire, cela ira encore mieux en le disant" during the Vienna Congress in 1814."
>> That is the report of a linguistic act (a declarative speech act that reports another, subtler speech act), which can be modeled as follows (in Turtle, and using a default namespace ":" for a domain ontology, full example at http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/example/talleyrandquotation.ttl):
>> 
>> :lingAct_1 a :Quote .
>> :Quote rdfs:subClassOf semiotics:LinguisticAct .
>> :lingAct_1 situation:isSettingFor _:agent . 
>> _:agent a agentrole:Agent .
>> _:agent :authorOf "http://dinoutoo.pagesperso-orange.fr/histo/tal1.htm"^^xsd:anyURI .
>> :lingAct_1 situation:isSettingFor :lingAct_2 .
>> :lingAct_2 a :Say .
>> :Say rdfs:subClassOf semiotics:LinguisticAct .
>> :lingAct_2 situation:isSettingFor :Talleyrand .
>> :Talleyrand a agentrole:Agent .
>> :lingAct_2 situation:isSettingFor _:time .
>> _:time :inDate "06-10-1814"^^xsd:date .
>> :lingAct_2 situation:isSettingFor _:sentence .
>> _:sentence a semiotics:Expression .
>> _:sentence ontolex:lexicalForm "Si cela va sans dire, cela ira encore mieux en le disant"^^xsd:string .
>> :lingAct_2 situation:isSettingFor _:meaning .
>> _:meaning a semiotics:Meaning .
>> :lingAct_2 situation:isSettingFor _:reference .
>> _:reference a semiotics:Reference .
>> _:reference :partOf :CongressOfVienna .
>> 
>> if we know more about that quotation, we might add something more about _:meaning:
>> 
>> _:meaning semiotics:relatedMeaning :Clarity .
>> :Clarity a semiotics:Meaning .
>> _:meaning :modality :needed .
>> :needed a :Modality .
>> _:meaning :inContext :InternationalTreaty .
>> :InternationalTreaty a dbpedia:Event .
>> 
>>> 
>>> Some unreferenced elements: agent, hasComponent... what is their purpose exactly?
>> 
>> Those are actually references, but in other - imported - patterns (agent role, situation, cpannotationschema)
>> 
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> John
>> 
>> Aldo
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Elena Montiel-Ponsoda
> Ontology Engineering Group (OEG)
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