Re: another use case for RDF

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> > It's forwarded from teh RDF Interest Group. Since Sean is the
> > perpetrator, he has likely seen it already and can be clearer about
> > the goals, but the basic idea is dealing with spelling mistakes.
>
> Yes, but it's not valid RDF because DanBri's original letter wasn't in RDF.
> To get it to work, you'd have to convert an entire letter/page/+ to data,
> spell check it, and then convert it back - i.e. as part of a specialized
> spell-checker, not an RDF processor.
> Having said that, I do like the ideas from Charles/Lisa about using RDF for
> spell checking, a thesaurus, a dictionary, etc. DanBri's Wordnet stuff is a
> good indicator of what RDF can do, and it would be very easy indeed to
> modify it to become a thesaurus or a dictionary. Since Dan is now an
> official unlurker on the list, maybe he can chip in :-)
>


So WordNet is indeed a very interesting case. Unlike many Library
thesauri, the modelling has been done cleanly enough to project the
broader/narrower axis onto RDF's class hierarchy. This is because WordNet
makes distinctions such as:

(excuse the ascii art rdf)

    fido -- type --> Dog -- subClassOf --> Mammal

rather than the looser

    fido -- broaderTerm --> Dog --> broaderTerm --> Mammal

...which is often what you find in thesauri. This is great for WordNet,
since each word it defines becomes an RDF class, allowing us to write RDF
that looks quite intutiive as XML:

<wn:Image>
  <foaf:depicts>
    <wn:Person foaf:name="..."> ...etc


In the DESIRE project and at ILRT we have also done a bit of work
reflecting classical thesauri into RDF, adopting the
broaderTerm/narrowerTerm modelling style. I recently
started to clean up these docs (there's an implementation too, pretty
simple over SQL based RDF store).

Writeup (as yet uncirculated in present form...)

	http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/01/rdf-thes/
	RDF Thesaurus Specification (draft)

	Conceptual relationships for encoding thesauri, classification systems and
	organised metadata collections and a proposal
        for encoding a core set of thesaurus relationships using an RDF Schema

Feedback / suggestions / applications welcomed. This is intended to be a
spec that gets deployed not one written up for academic purposes :)

cheers

Dan

Received on Thursday, 1 February 2001 11:58:31 UTC