Re: owl:sameAs links from OpenCyc to WordNet

On 23/2/09 20:04, Danny Ayers wrote:
> 2009/2/23 Matthias Samwald<samwald@gmx.at>:

>   In
>> contrast, I would still prefer an established, generic property to something
>> that needs to be invented anew. rdfs:seeAlso is established (which also
>> means that people are more likely to re-use it then something you create in
>> your own little namespace), and it is also understood by some existing
>> applications. If all of us are starting to create our own "is quite similar
>> to" predicates, we are probably worse off than just using rdfs:seeAlso. The
>> semantics of these "is quite similar to" relations would probably be so
>> fuzzy that they would hardly be any more precise and useful than
>> rdfs:seeAlso, anyways.
>
> There does seem to be a considerably more precise correspondence
> between Cyc concepts and WordNet terms than rdfs:seeAlso describes.
>
> But taking your point of what existing applications understand,
> perhaps it might make sense to use rdfs:seeAlso in parallel with a
> custom term?

That was to be my original suggestion, but I trimmed the sentence about 
rdfs:seeAlso as I was too lazy to defend the suggestion.

There is certainly much richer information here than is captured by 
rdfs:seeAlso. Furthermore, it is a very useful kind of information: that 
which associates the core machinery of RDFS/OWL (classes) with the 
natural language vocabulary used by mere mortal humans.

I'm not sure that the wordnet: Synset class is the final say in 
linguistics-related RDF vocab, but some bridging property from classes 
to this makes a lot of sense. In a SKOS concept I have been revisiting 
the idea of an "it" property that relates a SKOS concept to "the thing 
itself". If the Synset were modelled as a SKOS concept, then the class 
here is "the thing itself". See 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/3282565132/ for the "it" business. I 
bounced this idea off Alistair Miles (putting "it" into FOAF) and he 
thought it fine, since the SKOS group didn't handle this within SKOS. 
I'm interested if this might be another use case for such a property...

Dan

Received on Monday, 23 February 2009 19:16:46 UTC