Comments and questions on the specification

Dear lemon community,

For my PhD research (working with historical thesauri), I've been looking
into the lemon modules and what they can express. There are a few comments
I'd like to place on the current specification/report. The majority of
these are simply pointing out some minor mistakes or inconsistencies in the
documentation, others are matters that are not wholly clear to me as a
reader (and therefore possibly to others as well) and may require
additional clarification.

The sections mentioned below refer to those in the current specification (
http://www.w3.org/2016/05/ontolex/).

   - *section 2.2*
   The namespace  <http://www.w3.org/ns/lemon/all>   currently provides
   module ontolex only, instead of all modules. Can this be remedied?
   - *section 5.2*
   decomp:constituent and rdf:_[number] are currently both required to
   state the order of constituents. This is, to me, a logical choice,
   considering one would not want to create multiple subproperties for
   decomp:constituent just to indicate the ranking of the constituent (e.g.
   decomp:constituent_1, decomp:constituent_2, etc). Considering rdf:_1,
   rdf:_2 etc. are subproperties of rdfs:member, however, I would still have
   expected decomp:constituent to at least be asserted as subproperty of
   rdfs:member. This would make the relation between decomp:constituent
   and any required sequence a lot more apparent.
   - *section 6.1*
   One of the example figures contains a mistake. See the image below the
   text "The following example gives an example of a sense relation:". Here,
   the SenseRelation is displayed between references rather than between
   LexicalSenses. (The Turtle below is correct, however.)
   - *section 9.1*
   The example (both the figure and in Turtle) speaks of Sense /
   ontolex:Sense. These URIs do not exist in the final specification. I assume
   it should read vartrans:SenseRelation instead.
   - *overall*
   Names for properties, when shown in definition boxes, are sometimes
   written with an initial capital and sometimes not. This is a minor styling
   issue, although for readability it would be beneficial to not use initial
   capital for properties.
   - *sections 3.6 and 9*
   These sections discuss how Wordnet and such can be represented in
   ontolex. The use of LexicalConcept for what is known as a synset in Wordnet
   is clear. I suspect that it is the intention that the reverse is also true:
   that a LexicalConcept with the entries that evoke it, and the senses that
   lexicalize it, should always be expressed as a synset in Wordnet. In other
   words, that ontolex:evokes and ontolex:isLexicalizedSenseOf connections
   with a LexicalConcept are by definition considered (near-)synonyms. Is this
   assumption correct?
   If it is, I miss super properties for these two ontolex properties that
   are certainly needed in my own use case -- for historical thesauri. Some of
   these do not capture synonymy relations but still organize words and their
   senses through meaning/concepts. Hence the need to state, for example, that
   a LexicalSense is categorized under a certain concept or semantic
   field (e.g. "milk, v." under the concept of "Farm"), but is not a direct
   expression/lexicalization of that concept.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the above.

Yours faithfully,
--
Sander Stolk, MSc MA
PhD researcher at Leiden University, the Netherlands