<div dir="ltr">An ontology is, intuitively, a collection of facts about a set of entities.<div>- It may have complex logical formulae (the heavyweight kind of ontology)</div><div>- It may have logical statements of a restricted kind, as in description logics or CycL</div>
<div> This is the case that would count as prototypical for most researchers in ontologies</div><div>- It may have semantic relations between concepts, as in DBPedia, ConceptNet or the various "extended" wordnets</div>
<div> This is the prototypical case for people from the "semantic web" community</div><div>- It may have a high coverage of taxonomical relations, with selected non-taxonomical relations added</div><div> This is the typical case for wordnets (i.e. Princeton WordNet, WOLF, GermaNet, etc.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>As such, wordnets make rather lightweight ontologies, but they are more ontology-like than, say,</div><div>thesauri or machine-readable dictionaries.</div><div><br></div><div>What makes WordNet useful is that you have information attached to each concept that relates it to things</div>
<div>that are external to the ontology - word lemmas in WordNet, or images in ImageNet. Without this additional</div><div>information, you would just have a very big tree-ish graph, which is why WordNet would count as trivial and uninteresting</div>
<div>for some ontology researchers. On the other hand, the more complex ontologies are typically small, and</div><div>usually are limited to some domain or an upper-level ontology.</div><div><br></div><div>The taxonomic information in wordnets is quite useful, but e.g. for graph-based WSD you cannot use only</div>
<div>taxonomic links. Hence, people working on graph-based WSD have added nontaxonomic links, sometimes</div><div>without a specific interpretation as a semantic relation (i.e., something that can be interpreted as a claim</div>
<div>about instances of these concepts), which again would be weird if you only looked at the ontology part and</div><div>not at the whole "words -> concepts -> approximate semantics" story.</div><div><br>
</div><div>So, in summary, WordNet and other wordnets could be adequately described as machine-readable dictionaries with</div><div>an ontological component, but saying they are ontologies would do injustice to both WordNet and ontologies.</div>
<div><br></div><div>To quote Miller et al (1993: Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database):</div><div><div>`` The initial idea was to provide an aid to use in searching dictionaries conceptually, rather</div>
<div>
than merely alphabetically—it was to be used in close conjunction with an on-line</div><div>dictionary of the conventional type. As the work proceeded, however, it demanded a</div><div>more ambitious formulation of its own principles and goals. ''</div>
</div><div><br></div><div>Eventually, those wanting to provide conceptual underpinnings for machine-readable dictionaries</div><div>and those who want to link ontologies to texts found out that they pursue the same long-term goals,</div>
<div>althought maybe from a different starting point, and even now with some differences in short-term goals.</div><div><br></div><div>Best wishes,</div><div>Yannick</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 11:57 AM, liling tan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alvations@gmail.com" target="_blank">alvations@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">Dear corpora linguists,<div><br></div><div>There is recently a discussion on stackoverflow about "wordnet vs ontology". I would like your perspective on several issues about wordnet and ontology:</div>
<div><br></div><div>- Is wordnet an ontology? If it is not an ontology, what is it?</div><div><br></div><div>- What is the definition of an ontology? Is anything (words/concept/entities) under a hierarchical structure some sort of linguistic ontology?</div>
<div><br></div><div>- Are linguistic onotology / information science ontology subjected to only upper and domain ontology?</div><div><br></div><div>- Any other comments about ontology and wordnet?</div><div><br></div><div>
Regards,</div><div>liling</div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div>
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