Re: current draft of the spec

Dear all, I have not written here before and am mainly on the list to keep updated on the development of ontolex. I am a PhD student at Linköping university, Sweden, doing data-driven, computer-supported terminology management.

The issue of terminological variants is closely related to terms being domain specific.

> 2) Terminological Variant:
> 
> Terminological Variations are relations between LexicalEntries that have two (different) senses that however have the same concept as reference. One could thus say that the meanings of these lexical entries are extensionally equivalent, but differ intensionally and pragmatically in that the lexical entries are used in different contexts, domains, have a different register or have different pragmatic connotations.

There are two kinds of terminological issues:

1. more than one wordform/lexical entry is used to refer to a single concept.
2. a single wordform is used to refer to more than one concept.

Terminological variants, as described above, fall in to the first case. In many cases, the variance is domain dependent, i.e. we use the term "x" to refer to concept A in one domain and the term "y" to refer to the same concept in a different domain. To capture this, terms need to be associated with a specific domain/context.

However, because of issue 2, there is a need to have multiple term entries for a single lexical entry. The lexical entry "file" would need at least two terminological entries, t1 = Term(lexicalEntry:file, domain:filesystem), t2 = Term(lexixalEntry:file, domain:metalTools).

Issue 2 also means that a lexical entry may be involved in terminological variance in a domain, but not in all domains.

Does this make sense to you?

regards,

Jody Foo