Re: A final set of issues with the specification

Dear John, Elena, all,

Answering about the "category" property issue...

2015-09-04 11:28 GMT+02:00 John McCrae <john@mccr.ae>:

>
>>> 3. The vartrans:category "property indicates the specific type of a
>>> relation", we already have a property to do this namely rdf:type! It is
>>> not clear to me from the text why we need to redefine this property. (i.e.,
>>> either we need to better justify this or drop this property)
>>>
>>> No clear opinion about this yet.
>>>
>> The *category* property indicates the specific type of relation by which
>> two lexical entries or two lexical senses are related.
>> Indeed, the definition may seem a bit general. However, the rdf:type
>> property seems to us as"too underspecified" (and, therefore, not worthy of
>> being included in the vartrans module...) and maybe not familiar to the
>> linguistic community.
>> We propose to slightly modify the definition as "The *category* property
>> indicates the specific type of *lexico-semantic relation* by which two
>> lexical entries or two lexical senses are related"
>> And add an explanation in this line: This property is meant to capture
>> different lexical and semantic relations of the sort: initialism,
>> ortographic variant, dialectal or geographic variant, register variant,
>> chronological variant, stylistic variant, dimensional variant, synonymy,
>> antonymy, or translation. A set of lexico-semantic relations are available
>> in the lexinfo vocabulary.
>> (A nice list of these types of variation and translation relations was
>> included some time ago at:
>> http://www.w3..org/community/ontolex/wiki/Specification_of_Requirements/Properties-and-Relations-of-Entries
>> <http://www.w3.org/community/ontolex/wiki/Specification_of_Requirements/Properties-and-Relations-of-Entries>
>> )
>>
>> Finally, ObjectProperty: Category, should be in small letters, right?
>>
> The advantage of rdf:type is that we have normal ontology reasoning. For
> example in WordNet we have not just meronyms, but 'part', 'substance' and
> 'member' meronyms so with rdf:type from the following
>
> :myLSR              rdf:type        wordnet:PartMeronym .
> wordnet:PartMeronym rdfs:subClassOf lexinfo:Meronym .
> lexinfo:Meronym     rdfs:subClassOf vartrans:SenseRelation.
>
> Then from this we can infer that myLSR is a meronym and a sense relation.
> If we introduce a category property then it is very difficult to create a
> hierarchy of LSRs, right?
>
>

According to the RDFS semantics rdf:type is used to state that a resource
is an instance of a class. So A rdf:type B states that B is an ontology
Class. In some situations this is OK, such as in the last example given by
John. But in some other this is not intended. For instance, if we would
replace in "Example vartrans/example1"

:fao_initialism vartrans:category <http://www.isocat.org/rest/dc/333>

by

:fao_initialism rdf:type <http://www.isocat.org/rest/dc/333>

we are inferring that <http://www.isocat.org/rest/dc/333> (category for
"initialism") is a Class, which is probably not intended as Isocat is just
a (plain) catalog of categories (annotations at most, but not classes).

In my view, we have to keep "vartrans:category" and use "rdf:type" in
addition when further inference is desired.

Regards,
Jorge


-- 
Jorge Gracia, PhD
Ontology Engineering Group
Artificial Intelligence Department
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
http://jogracia.url.ph/web/