Re: [WN] comments on draft

Hi Jacco, some comments inside

At 10:03 +0100 26-11-2005, Jacco van Ossenbruggen wrote:
>Review of http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark/wn/wn-conversion.html
>
>I agree with the comments posted previously by Jeremy (see below).
>In addition, as a reader I was a bit confused about the many open 
>issues. What makes things worse is that the possible solutions to 
>many of the open issues are unsufficiently documented that I, as the 
>reader, can form an opinion about them.
>Minor remarks:
>-Section 3, explains the prolog format of 
>s(100003009,1,"living_thing",n,1,1):
>    Please also explain the last three arguments, or state that they 
>are explained in Appendix A
>
>-Section 4, do not forget to resolve [WHY DOES WORD NOT HAVE THESE 
>SUBCLASSES?].
>-Figure caption "The clas hierarchy of WordNet:", fix typo in class, 
>remove ending colon
>-You do not use subClassOf a la Brickley.  Maybe an example of how 
>to get the same semantics using
>RDF meta modeling is in place?

The same semantics cannot be got.
subClassOf formally means set inclusion, while "hypernymOf" is only a 
property, which is formally equivalent to the existence of an ordered 
pair across two sets. Moreover, while "set" in the first semantics is 
the extension of the class of individuals named by a synset, "set" in 
the second semantics is the extension of the class of all synsets.
Technically, a mapping could be done between the two semantics, but 
the interpretation of all synsets as classes and of all hypernymOf 
relations as subClassOf is untenable wrt intuition, because many 
synsets refer to individuals, many hypernymOf relations refer to 
instanceOf (rd:type), and there are other problems. This means that 
semantic porting needs data reengineering, not just schema 
translation.
Similar problems have been shown for many thesauri in the past and in 
particular in the SKOS work.
A second draft (if time permits) should treat the semantic porting of 
WordNet. Of course, an example can be added also in the current one.

>-The document suggest there has not yet been contact with Princeton 
>about the namespace. Should this not be
>done before going public?  If not, has a meeting with Princeton 
>already been scheduled?

The contact has been created months ago, and we have just sent a 
message to Christiane Fellbaum to point her at the material for the 
port, and eventually create the namespace.

Ciao
Aldo

>-How to generate URIs for other languages?  Related to 
>resolving:[THIS IGNORES LANGUAGE ISSUE! should we append language 
>indicator?]. Also related: URI vs IRI (How to deal with non-latin1 
>languages).
>Do translations use the same Prolog format?  Works the converter 
>program also for these translations?
>-In appendix A, would it make sense to adopt the prolog convention 
>of writing Variables with a starting capital?
>As a prolog programmer, it took me a while to realize what was a 
>atom, literal or variable/placeholder in the prolog code fragments.
>
>Jacco
>
>Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>>
>>
>>Reviewed document:
>>http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark/wn/wn-conversion.html
>>
>>
>>1. the abstract is not an abstract
>>
>>2. abstract/sotd or intro needs to set expectations about target
>>audience and contribution of this document, and its non-objectives
>>
>>i.e.
>>[[
>>The TF should produce guidelines for transforming existing wordnets into
>>an RDF/OWL representation. Guidelines should describe strategies for
>>converting wordnets-like structures into an RDF representation, as well
>>as strategies for re-describing in RDF/OWL the content originally
>>conveyed in the wordnets.
>>]]
>>
>>3. URI issue could/should be expanded, highlighted somewhat.
>>Covering:
>>  - do the terms like synset etc need a different URI from the terms in
>>the wordnet itself (e.g. #bank-1)
>>- different URIs for different versions?
>>- hash (one huge file) versus slash (303 response? WebArch issue)
>>
>>Jeremy


-- 



Aldo Gangemi
Research Scientist
Laboratory for Applied Ontology
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy
Tel: +390644161535
Fax: +390644161513
aldo.gangemi@istc.cnr.it
http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=71

Received on Saturday, 26 November 2005 13:51:46 UTC