RE: [ontolog-forum] Wordnet Representations - XSD/RDF/OWL

From: Michael Daconta <mdaconta@aol.com> · Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 08:46:56 -0700

Hi Danny,

I agree with your analysis.  To summarize, the benefits of
modeling the Wordnet constructs as OWL would be the
addition of OWL constraints and a common query/inference
engine.  Of course, if my query engine was RDF based, that
would also be "common" since even my OWL ontologies are based
on RDF.

I plan on working through an OWL version of the metamodel and
then have them both side-by-side for comparison.  I will post
it to my website (and announce here) when complete.

Thanks,

  - Mike

Danny Ayers wrote on 1/23/2004, 4:19 AM:
 > (cc'ed to rdf-interest again)
 >
 > re. http://www.daconta.net/project_folder/WordnetMetamodel.html
 >
 > > On OWL DL versus RDF.  The current version which is parseable in RDF
 > > does not use any of the rdfs vocabularly.  So, what I am asking is what
 > > do you feel the benefits of modeling the wordnet constructs as classes
 > > as compared to the current resource-based approach.  What does saying a
 > > Concept (aka synset) is a Class buy us?
 >
 > Ok, starting from the data available already, e.g.
 >
 > <wn:Word ...>
 >     <wn:partsOfSpeech rdf:parseType="Collection">
 >         <wn:PartOfSpeech wn:type="verb">
 >             <wn:concepts rdf:parseType="Collection">
 >                 <wn:Concept rdf:ID="_1943890">
 > ...
 >
 > the (striped) parsing of the syntax that's saying RDF interpretation
 > stuff like
 >
 > <_1943890> rdf:type Concept
 >
 > and I /think/ there's an RDFS interpretation available as well from
 > entailments, including bits like
 >
 > Concept rdf:type rdfs:Class
 >
 > and on top of that you could also apply an OWL Full interpretation...
 >
 > But whatever, it's all as unconstrained as it could be. Your data
 > example does look quite set-oriented (lots of collections) and I'm
 > only guessing, but I think it should be possible to apply a load of
 > OWL constraints.
 >
 > I nearly forgot - the benefit of the constaints being that it's
 > easier/more efficient to query. You could probably bung the data into
 > a RDBMS quite neatly, but presumably you want to use it alongside
 > other ontologies and interfacing there could get messy. So using a
 > common query/inference engine would be desirable.
 >
 > The benefit of using OWL DL is that it's decidable, or so the theory
 > gos. I suspect that the practice at this point in time is that you're
 > probably more likely to find a usable OWL DL engine than one for OWL
 > Full. (See [1])
 >
 > What is the cost? Hard to say. I don't think there would be any cost
 > in the modelling, as I don't think you'll need to mix instances and
 > classes in the way DL doesn't like. If this was something like RSS we
 > were talking about, with loads of tools deployed that see RDF/XML as a
 > bunch of regular expressions to be pretty printed, there would be a
 > major cost. But (praise be!) it isn't, the slate is relatively clean.
 > (Having said that, isn't there a DAML wn  interpretation somewhere,
 > and didn't the good Mr. Brickley have a server for the terms too?)
 >
 > But as I mentioned earlier, I reckon it would be easier to change from
 > OWL DL -> Full (i.e. plain RDFS) if necessary after initial deployment
 > than vice versa, the main reason being owl:Class is a subclass of
 > rdfs:Class.
 >
 > One thing I've been meaning to bring up on rdf-interest or somesuch is
 > the idea of producing two versions of vocabularies - one geared
 > towards OWL, one towards plain RDF. This could presumably cause
 > complications if deployed in the wild on the Semantic Web, but at this
 > point in time it may be easier to mix and match with other vocabs
 > using RDFS publicly, but easier to reason with using OWL DL locally.
 >
 > Couple of cents anyway.
 >
 > Cheers,
 > Danny.
 >
 >
 > [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/impls
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
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-- 
-----------------------------
Michael C. Daconta
Chief Scientist, APG McDonald Bradley, Inc.
www.daconta.net