Re: WordNet Task Force - work outline

>At 16:35 +0100 30-03-2004, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>I still owe an example of a simple use of WordNet ...

>this wasn't quite the one I had in mind, but has the advantage of being more 
>real:

>http://norman.walsh.name/knows/where#dk-copenhagen

>is described as having RDF type

>http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/City

>clicking on the above URL gives an RDF/XML download ....
>and uses words from WordNet as RDF classes ...

>I think what Norm is trying to do is simply say that his copenhagen URI is a 
>resource which belongs to a class with some (strong) relationship to the 
>english word city in wordnet 1.6 sense 1 with description 'a large and densely 
>populated urban area; may include several independent administrative 
>districts; "Ancient Troy was a great city"'

>This use of WordNet is fairly naive (in the sense that non-experts can do it) 
>and does not depend on any of the relationships between words.

>Jeremy

I agree, indeed this is what I expect from Wordnet on the Semantic Web: the 
Copenhagen Norm is talking about is an instance of 
http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/City. All right.

But also look at the file at http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/City: City is a class 
introduced with all its taxonomic branch (poor practice: if each class is 
introduced with all its superclasses, the ontology results unnecessary long), 
then all hyponyms of "City" are introduced, for instance:

 <Class rdf:about="http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Dunkerque">
  <subClassOf rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/City"/>
    <label>Dunkerque</label>
 <comment>a city in northern France on the North Sea where in World War II 
(1940) 330,000 Allied troops had to be evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk in 
a desperate retreat under enemy fire</comment>
  </Class>

But Dunkerque can be hardly a class, except in some peculiar ontologies that 
take 4D and set-theoretically extensional classes (Dunkerque as the temporal 
worm equivalent to the set of all the states in the area named Dunkerque!).

In fact, the hyperonym relation in WordNet *generally* means subClassOf, but 
words and terms often name individuals, and many individuals are so important 
to be put in a dictionary as Wordnet. Cities are a case.

Then, when reengineering WordNet for the SW, WN data types should be remapped 
to OWL (or RDF) data types in a consistent way, and I think our job is to 
explain as much as possible how to obtain that consistency.

Another curious thing: I supposed Copenhagen being there, but it is not. I 
checked WordNet, and the reason is that Copenhagen is a hyponym of "Capital 
City", which is a hyponym of "City", then it is not included in the resource.

Moreover, putting both "Capital City" and "Dunkerque" as hyponyms of "City" is 
patently a poor practice of ontological modelling (but not necessarily for a 
dictionary such as WN).

Thanks for pointing at that spontaneous example. The use of Norm is not naïve, 
it is precise. What is too simplistic is the type mapping encoded in the RDFS 
file.

Cheers
Aldo



-- 
Aldo Gangemi
Research Scientist
Laboratory for Applied Ontology
ISTC-CNR
Via Nomentana 56, Rome, Italy
+39.06.86090249

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Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 04:22:30 UTC