[public-ontolex] <none>

Dear all,

one important question raised by John in the last meeting, about LIME
(LInguistic MEtadata...or...the green brother of LEMON :-) ).

"Ok, I understand the need for metadata about how an ontology is
enriched/covered by lexical info, but is in the scope of Ontolex to provide
metadata/categories about linguistic resources?" (John, I hope I
synthetized your point appropriately)

In:
http://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/wiki/Metadata_Module

I reported the first draft of LIME vocabulary.

As you may see, there are properties/classes for synthetizing the
"linguistic asset" of an ontology.

Then, there are classes representing various kind of linguistic resources
(Dictionary, BilingualDictionary) and their switchable characteristics
(hasGlosses, hasTaxonomy etc..). And these were the focus of John's
question.

I give here a few reasons for which these should be part of Ontolex:

1) if we want to describe how ontologies can be interface with lexicons, we
should be able to provide enough details about the lexicon (though this has
not to include the description of a Linguistic Resource)

2) we already mapped WordNet, and I thought we were addressing how to map
various LRs

3) we have a module about lexical linked data, isn't the above metadata
about that lexical linked data which we already included in the scope?
I then could provide other motivations for interesting scenarios: for
instance, ten years ago, I wrote a (initially) simple plugin for Protege,
called OntoLing, usable for enriching ontologies with content coming from
linguistic resources. The plugin attracted the attention of many people who
found finally a tool for performing this task, and the good thing is that
the tool could be easily  customizable throug plugins. The theory behind
that is: "tell me what a resource is, and I tell how to use it at its
best". We thus could easily plug WordNet, EuroWordnet, FreeDict, Freelang
dictionaries etc.. and we could add easily as well add other resources
provided by partners in specific projects. This description later took a
life on its own, being called Linguistic Watermark.

Other important scenarios are ontology mapping ones: today after years of
OAEI contests, still access to lexical resource for supporting matchhing,
is considered foundamental, though it is still not:
1) clear
2) systematic
and including the support from ling resources is more a craftwork than a
clear asset in any alignment workflow/architecture

The Linguistic Watermark was initially only a software engineering solution
for modeling heterogeneous resources (not available as RDF) to be
dynamically loaded into a consistent framework for enriching ontologies.
Years later, with RDF technologies getting more ground, time was mature for
thinking about a way to represent this info in RDF, that's were (part of)
the LW became the ancestor of what we are now presenting as LIME.

All of the above has surely something to do with interfacing Ontologies
with Lexicons.

Ok, obviously, I had to advocate the thing ;-) but I totally understand the
importance of the question from John, so...discussion is open!

Cheers,

Armando

P.S: This email was also agreed last week, to provide the needed
background, in order to start the discussion in our meetings



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Armando Stellato, PhD
AI Research Group at Tor Vergata (ART)
Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Production
University of Roma Tor Vergata
Via del Politecnico 1
00133 Roma, Italy
email: stellato@info.uniroma2.it
home: http://art.uniroma2.it/stellato
office +39-06-72597330
lab.   +39-06-72597332
fax    +39-06-72597460
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