Re: Why not to shortcut the "sense" object

All, 

I apologize for missing the call today. Here just some short remark.

"Entry ---means--> OntologyEntity" means that if you want to predicate on 
the meaning relationship (e.g. to associate some grammatical constraint) 
you have to resort on a meta predicates (e.g. OWL Annotations).

"Lexical Entry -> meaning -> Sense -> representedBy -> OntologyEntity" 
sounds good, but instead of 'representedBy' I would say 'characterizes' or 
something alike, meaning that a linguistic sense gives a (cultural) shape 
to an entity. Moreover, it is not clear to me (maybe you discussed about 
that) whether OntologyEntity is a first order TOP concept (e.g. equivalent 
to OWL Thing). In this case, note that in order to tell that the instance 
of Sense 'cat#1' (i.e. the first sense of the lemma 'cat') represents an 
Animal, you have to write something like: 

cat#1 INSTANCEOF (Sense AND characterizes ONLY Animal).

Is it correct?

If there is something that I can do, please let me know.

Regards,

Guido Vetere
Manager, Center for Advanced Studies IBM Italia
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John McCrae <jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> 
Sent by: johnmccrae@gmail.com
12/10/2012 16:35

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public-ontolex <public-ontolex@w3.org>
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Subject
Why not to shortcut the "sense" object






Hi all,

As discussed today in the telco there is a proposal to introduce a 
shortcut replacing "Entry ---sense--> Sense ---representedBy--> 
OntologyEntity" with "Entry ---means--> OntologyEntity", while this is 
theory sounds good, I contend that in practice it is not worth the effort. 
(This is based on practical experience with the lemon model).
It does not make the model easier to use: It is clear that for data 
producers this proposal simplifies the matter (as less links and URIs are 
required), however for data consumers it complicates the models (as they 
need to understand both methods of linking and be able to infer 
equivalence between the two methods). Thus, if EaseOfUse = (% of 
Consumers) × EaseOfUse(Consumer) + (% of Producers) × EaseOfUse(Producer), 
hence if we assume there will be approx. as many producers as consumer 
then we need only ask is it worth "is the extra effort for the producer 
less than that for the consumer", i.e., "would you rather implement a 
system that infers similarity across multiple representations, or use 
extra links and URIs"?
It does not make the model easier to understand: While, I understand that 
the sense object is nebulous and difficult per se to understand, I would 
still argue that the clearest measure of how easy to understand a model 
is, is the number of named elements it has (as many users may not need to 
deeply understand the meaning of a sense, but be happy to know that 
"translation", "antonymy" and "register" go there). Here the difference is 
1 named elements vs. 3 named elements, but as stated above, at least half 
of users (data consumers) will have to understand all 4 names... if we 
assume out of the producers 70% do not need to represent senses (and thus 
any associated properties, "translation", "antonymy", "register") then the 
average number of links a user will need to understand is 4 × 0.5 + 
3 × 0.5 × 0.3 + 1 × 0.5 × 0.7 = 2.8... so it makes the model all of 7% 
easier to understand! Worse, this figure is overgenerous as: I expect 
there to more data consumers than producers and I expect at least 50% of 
users to require sense modelling.
Regards,
John

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