Re: WordNet modelling in Lemon and SKOS

Let me try to see if I have a correct understanding of the 'semiotic 
model', and to spot some consequence of embracing it. I'll adopt Aldo's 
ontology.

In http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/semiotics.owl, we have 
that Meaning (intension) is the 'conceptualization' of Reference (the 
extension of a given ontology class), i.e. each instance of Meaning may be 
bound with some instance of Reference, which stands for a owl:Class. For 
example, the Meaning 'cat' (= an animal so-and-so) can 'conceptualize' the 
Reference 'onto:Cat' (= the set of instances which satisfy the property 
Cat in the knowledge base where the ontology is interpreted). Technically, 
in OWL2, this can be done via 'punning', i.e. setting onto:Cat rdf:type 
semio:Reference, provided that onto:Cat is also rdf:type owl:Class.

As I noticed in some previous conversation, this model implies that 
terminological axioms in the ontology are not reflected in lexical sense 
relationships, and vice versa. We could have disjoint classes 
conceptualized by synonymous meanings, e.g. 'cat' meaning both cats and 
dogs, and I don't think this would be an 'intended model'. Still, this 
could be a nice property in many other cases, and after all is a 
consequence of Saussure's 'arbitrariness of sign' principle (hope you 
don't find 'history of semiotics' so boring). After all, the only 
alternative I see is to map Meanings directly to ontology classes, that 
is, setting instances of ontolex:Meaning as co-extensive to ontology 
concepts (e.g. by leveraging owl:sameInstanceAs). In this case, however, 
ontological and lexical semantics would collapse: whatever you predicate 
on the one side, should be valid on the other side, which is not 
advisable.

In Senso Comune, we adopt a semiotic model, but we have a subclass of 
Meaning for each lexical sense, instead of an instance. In fact, Meanings 
are instantiated within contexts where their (disambiguated) lexemes 
occur, i.e. texts, which makes them useful for supporting NLP tasks (e.g. 
co-reference resolution). Still, via punning, we manage to associate 
Meanings with LexicalEntry instances, to set lexical relationships, and so 
on. The problem of relating ontological and lexical axioms is still there. 
But we didn't go in depth with this, since we adopt a small, fixed 
foundational ontology (basically, DOLCE's top level). Our typical use 
case, i.e. mapping existing onto lexical resources, will require some 
clarification on this.

Guido Vetere
Manager, Center for Advanced Studies IBM Italia
_________________________________________________
Rome                                     Trento
Via Sciangai 53                       Via Sommarive 18
00144 Roma, Italy                   38123 Povo in Trento
+39 (0)6 59662137 

Mobile: +39 3357454658
_________________________________________________



Aldo Gangemi <aldo.gangemi@cnr.it> 
19/04/2013 01:14

To
John McCrae <jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>
cc
Aldo Gangemi <aldo.gangemi@cnr.it>, Armando Stellato 
<stellato@info.uniroma2.it>, Philipp Cimiano 
<cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>, public-ontolex <public-ontolex@w3.org>
Subject
Re: WordNet modelling in Lemon and SKOS






Hi John, I missed this when answering the other email. Just a few more 
clarifications about the schemas you provide, of course from my semiotic 
perspective. I remark that my attempts here are about a simplification of 
these matters.

lemon-skos-owl diagram:

from the point of view of semiotic relations, I'd rather put a mapping 
relation between a lexical sense and a skos concept, since they would both 
be (primarily) intensions, i.e. meanings. I do not understand skos:it

Armando's proposal diagram:

why do we need a lexical concept separated from a sense? I understand your 
point about WordNet designers' claims, but each designer of a lexical or 
linguistic resource tends to put its own philosophical view on vaguely 
defined notions like "concept", "meaning", etc. Provided that none has the 
authority to state the last word about those notions, I still think that 
basic distinctions between expressions, meaning (intension), and reference 
(extension) is something much less vague. Therefore I suggest to avoid 
resorting to "concepts": these are just another name for intensional 
entities, exactly like senses, meanings, etc.

John's diagrammatic rendering of semiotics.owl:

it's not quite what the model intends ? it's ok to say that a lexical 
entry has a lexical sense, and that a lexical sense denotes an ontology 
entity (extensionally viewed), but the rest is not correct, because a 
lexical sense (as meaning) is not an expression, and cannot express 
meanings. 

Please find here attached a diagram that tries to put together those 
proposed by you, from the perspective of semiotics.owl, where the semiotic 
triangle is used as a sort of "foundational ontology" for the ontolex 
classes and relations.

Aldo




On Apr 18, 2013, at 4:42:31 PM , John McCrae <
jmccrae@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:

Hi Armando, all,

I will try to synthesize a few other emails into this reply.

Firstly, I agree with much of what of Armando says. Although lexical 
senses may be a reification of the <Word,Synset> combo as Armando says, I 
feel this understates the importance of their role. In fact, from my 
understanding lexical senses constitute an extension of words used with a 
given meaning, by the same logic that a lexical entry (lexeme) consists of 
an extension of words used in various inflected form. By the converse it 
could be argued that the lexeme is therefore just a reification of the 
<Form,Concept> pair (in fact this approximately what a SKOS-XL label is). 
The key aspect is that is it useful in at least a significant percentage 
of language resources, in this case, the use of lexical sense as the 
annotation point for contexts (register, geographical usage), conditions 
(lexical selection restrictions) and examples (as in WordNet, see 
screenshot), make it IMHO a clearly vital part of the model.

When defining lemon, we tried to be partly agnostic about the format of 
the ontology... we assumed it would be OWL, but didn't rule out the case 
of linking to F-Logic, FOL, etc. From this point-of-view it is not 
unreasonable  to consider linking to a SKOS concept hierarchy as an 
informal ontology.

Much of the issue in this thread concerns what happens if we then want to 
link this synset/concept hierarchy to a (formal) ontology. In the 
following document they propose two options:

http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/SKOS/skos-and-owl/master.html

They propose "overlay" and "transform" options. I suspect most members of 
this list would reject the overlay option, so looking at the transform 
option we see a model using lemon, OWL and SKOS (first part of attached 
image), which uses the (unfortunately) hypothetical skos:it property to 
link between the concept (synset) and the ontology entity.

In a previous email today I proposed a modelling based on Aldo's 
semiotics.owl ontology (based on the understanding the lexical senses are 
expressions, synsets are meaning and ontology entities are references). As 
we can see this is structurally identical.

Finally, I also looked at Armando's proposal, and it also seems very 
similar in structure. From my opinion it should be possible to move the 
domain of Armando's sense link to the Sense class* and this would leave us 
agreeing in the structure if not the names of the labels!

Regards,
John

* Of course, if we take into account Philipp's proposed shortcut link (see 
http://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/wiki/Specification_of_Requirements/Lexicon-Ontology-Mapping
) between Lexical Entries and Ontology Entites, then this link would 
simply be the shortcut.


On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Armando Stellato <
stellato@info.uniroma2.it> wrote:
Hi again,
 
First of all,  this is a reply to all three emails from Philipp, John and 
Aldo (plus something more from other emails). Since the topic is the same, 
I wrote one single reply, as there are parts of their email in common. 
Also, a small legenda, for being shorter later in the argumentation:
 
Ontoelement(s): those elements of an ontology which need to be referenced 
through lexical information, that is, the objects of triples with 
ontolex:reference as their predicate. Note here that there is some abuse 
of notation: this ?target ontology? could actually be a skos concept 
scheme and not an owl:ontology. We do not assign any Class here, as these 
element could be properties, individuals, classes or concepts
3-entity-pattern: that LexicalEntry -> LexicalSense -> OntoElement 
structure we (more or less) agreed on.
 
Ah, one note?this is not only an interminably long discussion, I propose a 
model at the end :-D
 
I put here below names of people before any section, so that it is clear 
who said what and whom I?m replying to:
 
[Philipp]
I agree that in some sense the three-entity path seems an overkill for 
modelling WordNet. But I think that our goal should be to design a model 
to works for all cases and not tune the model to the particular case of 
WordNet. So I would prefer to use the same modelling (i.e. the 
three-entity path) across all specific resources.

[Armando]
Absolutely agree on our mandate to have something homogeneous and not 
hard-patched to some specific necessity. My proposed modelling for WordNet 
is in fact not in the direction of sprouting exceptions from our model to 
cover WordNet, but is actually (obviously, this is my opinion and I may be 
wrong) a more trustworthy replication of its structure, which I think is 
elegantly compatible with our model and even better matches it. Hence 
more, it fosters a better integration of WordNet when used to enrich an 
ontology.
However, my perspective is not totally incompatible with some modelling 
exigencies (see later my reply to John?s observations), and as you will 
see, some linking can be drawn up.
 
But, to argument better (at least, I hope), I have to take a step back 
(and sorry, I?ll be going through things that all of you know very well, 
but still I need to mention them for the argumentation).
 
In WordNet we have words (terms, whatever..), and these words are bound 
into collections called synonymy sets. To cite the most popular paper [1] 
about WordNet, ??synonym sets (synsets) do not explain what the concepts 
are; they merely signify that the concepts exist?. So, ok, synonym sets 
are just ?language extensional hints? to a concepts. We don?t know 
intensionally what that concept is, but we understand there is and we know 
linguistically how to refer to it. From a sentence in the same paper, just 
before the aforementioned one, we read: ?The synonym sets, {board, plank} 
and {board, committee} can serve as unambiguous designators of these two 
meanings of board?. So, meaning of boards, under an interpretative 
process, are designated by synsets.
>From the very first rows (the abstract) of that same publication, we read: 

?English nouns, verbs, and adjectives are organized into synonym sets, 
each representing one underlying lexical concept?.
 
Ok, perfect, personally, I?ve found what I would suggest for that 
element-in-the-middle in the 3-elements-path. It is called LexicalConcept, 
and fits dramatically well (even terminologically) as a subclass of 
skos:Concept. As I said many times, I personally didn?t like LexicalSense 
as, maybe exactly biased by my knowledge of WordNet, and by a bit of 
common sense, I would have used the word ?sense?, only to represent the 
relationship which holds between a LexicalEntry and a LexicalConcept. That 
is to say: a LexicalEntry may have many senses, and each of them is 
represented through a pointer ? through the relation: ?ontolex:sense? ? to 
a LexicalConcept, which accidentally in WordNet is a synset (not my words, 
I?m citing their literature).
 
Thus, recapping, in my view the thing is simple. I try to recap it as Aldo 
did in his email, but on my modelling perspective; therefore, to me the 
3-entities-pattern (and gluing props) in our language would be:
 
Class(ontolex:LexicalEntry) ?prop(ontolex:sense)?> 
Class(ontolex:LexicalConcept) ?prop(ontolex:reference)?> An Ontoelement
 
Until now, by purely graph-matching it with what has already been said, it 
seems I just don?t like the LexicalSense name, and replaced it with 
LexicalConcept, but there?s something different exactly when we consider a 
case like WordNet.
Let?s take these two other triples:
 
wordnet:Synset rdfs:subClassOf ontolex:LexicalConcept
wordnet:syn_v_00076153 rdf:type wordnet:Synset
 
thus, here we have just two renamings:
-          a synset instance renaming: very personally, I think the synset 
code is the most ?neutral way? of calling a synset, not biased by one of 
the terms which are part of it, which always gave me an headache; think 
this is the same thing Piek was referring to when talking about the choice 
of word-sensenumber pairs as URIs for synsets in the existing RDF version 
of WordNet
-          my LexicalConcept class instead of LexicalSense
but, apart from them, I took those two triples exactly as they are from 
Aldo?s example.
 
Now, the focus of my opposition to the original WordNet example (or 
better, of some implications of it which I heard as confirmed in the 
emails), is that I see this class LexicalConcept as exactly the ?vague 
lexical concept? ? of which we precisely know a lexical extension ? which 
can be put in between LexicalEntries and ontoelements in the 
3-entities-pattern.
It is exactly, for instance, the bnode we put in the example in: 
http://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/wiki/Specification_of_Requirements/Lexicon-Ontology-Mapping#Examples_using_DBpedia 
when we write:
 
:team a ontolex:LexicalEntry ;
  ontolex:canonicalForm [ontolex:writtenRep "team"@en ; ] ;
  ontolex:sense [ontolex:reference <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/team> ;
 
to link the :team LexicalEntry to the dbpedia:team resource.
 
Only?if we are using WordNet, someone has already prepared a set of these 
LexicalConcepts (seasoned with words!) for us, gave identifiers to them 
(so no bnodes necessary), and a general class for them, calling it Synset 
:-)
This is really the central part of what I?m saying.
 
Thus, a very basic (but still compliant) modelling can be:
 
wordnet:syn_n_08225481 ontolex:reference <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/team
> ;
 
and we get for free all the LexicalEntries already attached to WordNet, 
and modelled according to our vocabulary. Obviously, some other work can 
further enrich the lexical description of a WordNet synset (which in 
wordnet is just a set of words) thanks to our more fine grained vocabulary 
allowing for richer characterization of Lexical Entries. Still at least 
with one row above, we get a lot for free thanks to the mere existence of 
WordNet.
 
[Philipp]
Assuming that WordNet contains a conceptualization, each synset indeed 
represents a skos:Concept (a unit of thought) and in that sense it seems 
reasonable to see a Synset as a reference.
 
[Armando]
Agree on the skos:Concept part, not on the rest. WordNet is a lexical 
database. Its domain (the set of its linguistic concepts called synsets) 
is still linguistic, and the concepts of WordNet are thus IMHO these 
LexicalConcepts I?m advocating. If you commit somehow to WordNet, then you 
could (you should, in my advice) commit to (and take benefits from) using 
these synsets as the element-in-the-middle of our 3-entities-pattern.
I?m trying to assess WordNet in the right place of our wider 
onto-linguistic modelling, and I see it as the linguistic part which needs 
to be attached to the conceptual part. I wouldn?t like to see WordNet as a 
domain (world domain) concept scheme with attached labels that can be 
potentially mapped to our ontoelements. Obviously, the use of skos:Concept 
may be misleading in its name (as ?concept? could induce in the thought 
that - in the onto-lex composition - it is the ?onto? part), but I?m 
stressing that this extension of skos:Concept should be our 
ontolex:LexicalConcept, and that this ontolex:LexicalConcept itself is the 
right cap (superclass) for wordnet:Synset when considering WordNet as a 
specific instance of a Ontolex-modelable lexical resource. Finally, once 
more, this implies that Synsets should sit in between LexicalEntries and 
ontoelements in our 3-Entities-Pattern.
 
I try now to explain the contra for the example currently in the wiki. 
With the previous modelling, we get almost nothing back: we would have 
this ?general world ontology? called WordNet, which has its lexical 
entries (mediated through the Sense entity), and we have two distinct 
universes of possible actions:
1)      we could map the resources of our domain ontology/conceptscheme to 
the synsets of WordNet, much the same way we map two general domain 
ontologies or concept schemes.
2)      we could relate specific wordsenses, such as: 
wordsense-vomit-verb-1, to resources in our ontology.

But pay attention, in what I propose we could link a synset (
syn_v_00076153), through ontolex:reference, directly to ontoelements and 
use it - coherently with our model - to have all of that synsets 
lexicalentries bound to the intended ontoelement. In the current model 
instead, by using WordNet senses, we should link each sense of each word 
to the ontoelements
 
Thus we should state:
wordsense-vomit-verb-1  ontolex:reference    myont:vomit
wordsense-cat-verb-2       ontolex:reference   myont:vomit
 
but?is it not painful? We already had the synset as a common umbrella! Oh 
yes, surely we could decide some entailment, for which if I link 
(somehow..how? through skos:exactMatch?) a synset to an element of my 
ontologies, then all of its related wordsenses (that is, the set of senses 
for which certain words are bound to that synset) are bound to the 
ontoelements. But how to state this entailment in the general ontolex 
vocabulary, since Synsets are out of it? (and in fact the wiki example 
does not hint at any general definition of wordnet:Synset under some 
ontolex umbrella, being it only the last resource to be pointed by 
ontolex:reference, much like an ontoelement from any other ontology).
 
With a slight difference approach from Philipp and John, I see 
interestingly that Aldo proposed both Synset and WordSense as subclasses 
of ontolex:LexicalSense. This would mean that Aldo would actually allow to 
use synsets in the middle of our 3-elements-path

                wordnet:WordSense rdfs:subClassOf ontolex:LexicalSense
                wordnet:Synset rdfs:subClassOf ontolex:LexicalSense
 
this seems discordant from what Philipp and John say. While I obviously 
agree with the second axiom (it?s basically the core of what I?m saying), 
personally I can?t see wordnet:WordSense as well as a subclass of 
ontolex:LexicalSense, and, actually, can?t think how the two things 
(wordnet:WordSense and wordnet:Synset), which are solidly distinct, can be 
subclasses of the same class in any possible theory.
 
So (if I?m correct), in the case of Philipp and John, it seems Synset is 
left away from any convenient reuse, while in the case of Aldo, I?ve this 
big problem with the double subclassing of both Synset and WordSense under 
LexicalSense. You may not agree with me, but still it seems something is 
missing.

I was then trying to do the devil?s advocate and argument against myself: 
?what if I want to attach a given set of words to one of my ontoelements, 
but there is no synset in wordnet which rightly embraces it?, that is, for 
each synset I would consider, there is a word in it that I don?t like?. 
This could be a good point towards having word senses attached to 
ontoelements, rather than synsets. But actually it is not, as much as 
reducing commitment always reduces constraints and problems, but also 
offers less solutions and opportunities. The paper [1] (and suppose much 
more literature before that :-D ) is clear on the fact that true synonyms 
may never exist, and the concept of synonymy is dependent on the context, 
still the WordNet ontology (as all ontologies do) provides a 
discretization of a world model, where the ?world? is the ?generic use of 
language?, which in most of the cases will work, but may fail where this 
discretization is not correctly representing a given shade of meaning 
(i.e. there is no wordnet sense for a word, perfectly fitting the right 
concept we want to express in our ontology, and thus its lexicalization).
But the truth is always the same in all cases of commitment: you can 
decide to re-use what you have as much as you like, and get the benefits 
deriving from the (shareable!) work of others up to a reasonable extent. 
If nothing in wordnet fits a specific ontoelement of yours, then put a 
blank node as LexicalConcept in the 3-entity-pattern, and go along in 
customizing your specific lexical characterization, while still keeping 
the rest (probably 99% of your ontology) happily WordNet-decorated.
 
To recap until now, the moral behind all of that (beyond triples, names 
etc?), is that WordNet is a linguistic resource, and by treating it as a 
generic conceptualization, we could miss the opportunity of using it for 
what it is.
 
Now, a final remark, because John (and I want to assure here Piek as well 
about his concerns :-) ) is totally right in his email, when he says: 
[John]
?Firstly, I think an important point here is that WordNet does in fact 
have senses as a concept distinct from Synsets and Words?. 
 
[Armando]
Surely this is the best argumentation on supporting the fact that these 
senses shouldn?t go away if we want to fully support WordNet.
By first, something I already expressed in my previous email: it may not 
be our priority to have all of WordNet inside OntoLex; we could cover 85% 
of WordNet model through OntoLex, and then have some specific parts of it 
not under the cap of our generic vocabulary (but still WordNet having its 
own RDF modeling scheme, 100% covnering wordnet, and 85% mapped to 
ontolex). I?m not saying we shouldn?t cover it, I just want to stress that 
the focus in the discussions before is not on covering 100% WordNet, but 
on how to fit it inside our model, and how to use it to enrich an 
ontology. Given this, let?s assume that we want to cover it 100% and let?s 
go ahead. 
 
All of us know that, when representing a domain through a given model, we 
may have to represent things we perceive as different, through identical 
constructs. When we are in RDF, sometimes we have to reify relationships 
into entities. Conversely, in relational modelling, all entities and 
relations from an ER model become relations (e.g. then tables in a DB). 
So, surely fact is that in the traditional WordNet index-file-based DB, 
there is a sense index file, and that there, bindings between Synsets and 
Words are expressed, because sometimes they need to be cited explicitly as 
first-class citizens. 
Let us consider the case of lexical relations (which, namely, cover 
relations between words). In WordNet, (since it was born merely ?to be a 
theory of the Word Meaning box?, [1, pag. 5]) there are no purely lexical 
relations, and its lexical rels are actually stated between senses of a 
word, that is between word-synset pairs. For instance, in common speaking, 
we say that rise/fall are antonyms, but surely we are not addressing the 
US expression of ?autumn? as opposed to ?rise?: well, WordNet accounts for 
that, by specifying that two words are antonyms only when considering some 
of their intended senses.
Another example is the tag count, again in wordnet, telling how many times 
a specific word with a particular sense (tagged with a given synset) has 
appeared in a corpus (e.g. SemCor). Or the sense ordering already 
mentioned in other emails.
But is it anymore important than just an escamotage for adding additional 
statistical data, put some ordering, or better qualify lex relations? I 
think not. Synset and Words are the VIPs. Sense (in wordnet) is just the 
reification of the <Word, Synset> combo.
 
So, this is the notion of ?sense? in WordNet: a glueing object relating a 
Word to a Unit of Meaning (a lexical concept). The lexical concept is 
?hinted? by the index (through the synset code) and linguistically 
expressed by means of a Synset?s lexical extension: its words. A Word has 
a Sense in that it points to a given Unit of Meaning.  The Sense, as such, 
cannot have any definition, as it only reifies the link between Words and 
UnitOfMeanings. Here I think is where the confusion has happened until 
now, as sometimes we had this more elaborated concept of Sense as a unit 
of meaning, while in WordNet we needed a mere reification of a relation.
 
Thus on the one side, I would be tempted to say that ?sense? is a 
relationship, and as well, for being short, the property: ontolex:sense 
pretty well holds it, though not for linking to a reified LexicalSense, 
but for linking to a Unit of Meaning/LexicalConcept. On the other side, 
fact is that we may need (see above examples) a reification of that sense 
relationship. We have to keep the two things distinct. Here I would 
introduce ontolex:Sense exactly as this, not as a UnitOfMeaning, but as a 
reification of the relation between a Word and Unit of Meaning.
 
So far so good, it seems  I could have widen the path from plain literals 
to ontoelements instead of shortening it, but actually, if properly 
planned, we could have very useful properties, which can be exploded into 
reified objects if and where appropriate. And, most of all, we would keep 
Linguistic Resources as something usable to enrich ontologies, and not as 
further ontologies to be mapped.
 
MODEL PROPOSAL:
 
I would propose then the following model:
 
NOTES: 
I left out all the characterization of LexicalEntries, which is obviously 
important, but separate from this discussion. 
For ease of reading, I?m using  the empty prefix instead of :ontolex here.
 
CLASSES:
:LexicalConcept (or Unit of Meaning, but I?ll use LexicalConcept from now 
on)
:Sense
:LexicalEntry
 
PROPERTIES:
:sense                  domain: LexicalEntry                     range: 
LexicalConcept  (note the difference here)
:reference          domain: LexicalConcept               range: 
non-specified, expect however to ?land? on ontoelements.
 
:lexEntry             range: LexicalEntry         merely a construct for 
the role of LexicalEntries in reifiedRelations, such as :Sense
:lexConcept       range: LexicalConcept   merely a construct for the role 
of LexicalConcepts in reifiedRelations, such as :Sense
 
 
A :Sense (capital letter) is the reification of the :sense property. Being 
binary in involving LexicalEntries with their intended meaning 
(LexicalConcept), ontolex:sense plays well in most of the cases, but, if 
we need a reification, we may have the following rule:
 
:Sense(y)                            :lexEntry :LexicalEntry(x)
:Sense(y)                            :lexConcept :LexicalConcept(z)
------------------- --->
:LexicalEntry(x)                :sense :LexicalConcept(z)
 
 
Now, our 3-entity-pattern is, as I said initially:
 
Instof(ontolex:LexicalEntry) ?prop(ontolex:sense)?> Instof 
(ontolex:LexicalConcept) ?prop(ontolex:reference)?> An Ontoelement
 
Where InstOf(x) means: ?an instance of x?
 
Now, WordNet. Given that:
 
Wordnet:Synset              rdfs:subClassOf               :LexicalConcept
 
We may express things such as:
 
wordnet:syn_n_08225481          ontolex:reference          <
http://dbpedia.org/ontology/team> ;
 
thus bringing all of the LexicalEntries already defined in WordNet as 
synonyms in wordnet:syn_n_08225481, as valid LexicalEntries describing the 
ontology element dbpedia:team.
 
By no means it holds instead that:
Wordnet:Sense               rdfs:subClassOf               :LexicalConcept
As the former includes constructs made-of elements from the latter.
 
Ah, WordNet would have thus this reified senses, but still a direct 
connection of the form:
instOf(:LexicalEntry)                      :sense instOF(wordnet:Synset)
is possible and is hence welcome
 
As you may see:
 
1)      I preserved the possibility to reify Senses (necessary in 
WordNet), but separated this Sense reification from the LexicalConcept (or 
Unit of Meaning) present in the current model. 
2)      I allowed for these LexicalConcepts to be used as 
elements-in-the-middle of our 3-entities-pattern
 
The sense reification is very important in WordNet (as it may be in other 
resources), to keep track of very specific things such as word ordering, 
tag counting, or lexical relations, but while all of these have a very 
important role in the lexical resource, they are not to the extent of a 
ontolex binding. The :sense binary relation is more than enough in that 
context.
Once more, there cannot be any further ?semantic? characterization of 
:Sense. An instance of :Sense cannot have a description, as the 
description pertains to the LexicalConcept. :Sense, in short, is just an 
escamotage in RDF to further characterize word-synset pairs with 
additional data.
 
Really sorry for the?yes..erm? quite long email :-D
 
Cheers,
 
Armando
 
P.S: As said, names might be improved (someone could insist that the 
pointer to a WordNet synset IS de facto a reference), but I would stress 
not to let terminology affect our modeling, and instead try later to find 
the best way to name things if we agree on them (rem tenet?verba 
sequentur). My only concern is that I was definitely feeling something was 
not working with the previous modeling, and think this ?structure? much 
better renders our needs and properly exploit linguistic resources in the 
context of enriching conceptual knowledge.
 
[1] Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database George A. Miller, 
Richard Beckwith, Christiane Fellbaum, Derek Gross, and Katherine Miller

http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu/5papers.pdf
 
 

<wordnet-screenshot.png><OntoLexModels.png>


IBM Italia S.p.A.
Sede Legale: Circonvallazione Idroscalo - 20090 Segrate (MI) 
Cap. Soc. euro 347.256.998,80
C. F. e Reg. Imprese MI 01442240030 - Partita IVA 10914660153
Società con unico azionista
Società soggetta all?attività di direzione e coordinamento di 
International Business Machines Corporation

(Salvo che sia diversamente indicato sopra / Unless stated otherwise 
above)