<div dir="ltr">Dear Sebastian,<br><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">First, let me say that throughout my work, we've used these dictionary-and-ontology things (let's call them lexicalized ontologies),</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">sometimes more than one of them, and it's easy to see why</div><div class="gmail_extra">- a common representation (in terms of a data model such as triples)</div><div class="gmail_extra">- a common name space (such as URI senses)</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">..makes a lot of sense.</div><div class="gmail_extra">In that sense, Cyc/CycL and microtheories, recent work to provide a uniform wrapper around multiple wordnets (UBY-LMF) or RDF representations</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">of wordnets are all instances of one good idea which, if/when it fully works, would get us a huge step farther.</div><div class="gmail_extra">"If it works", in this case, means:</div><div class="gmail_extra">
- certain kinds of inference (such as: is this element linked to that element via multiple ISA steps, or, what is/are the least common ancestor(s)) can be supported very effectively</div><div class="gmail_extra"> by in-memory data structures with the right kind of indexing. It's very hard to do with an SQL database (because their data model is far more general) but might be efficiently</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"> supported by an RDF database that understands the subclass/superclass hierarchy. (With the caveat that Wordnet's hyponymy/hypernymy is not modeled as subclass/superclass</div><div class="gmail_extra">
for reasons that make sense ontologically, but may be frustrating in practice)</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><div>In the RDF world, we believe in URI senses. I agree, that RDF does
not add anything to the content of the original data. However, I
would argue, that it restructures the resource and makes the
modeling explicit, transparent and re-usable. Also discoverability
of data is increased.</div></div></blockquote><div>I fully agree that RDF's way of adding namespaces through URIs is the way to go. And TurtleRDF's way of declaring prefixes</div><div>means that you can use URIs with a lot less verbosity, i.e.</div>
<div>wn:n0001234 lemon:broader wn:n0002345</div><div>intead of having the full URIs in there.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div> RDF is a Framework to Describe Resources
such as WordNet. At the end of the day, it should be easier to
answer the question, which part of WordNet is on ontology (and can
be used as such) and what part is merely a dictionary.<br></div></div></blockquote><div>Seeing the full lemon spec, it's not always clear to me where the ontology stops and "the lemon creators shoehorning things such as syntax trees into an RDF notation" starts.</div>
<div>In a sense, this is an artefact of lemon's creators both trying to capture commonsensical constructs that everyone will use and doing new exciting things at the same time.</div><div>I find Miller's original intuition of "let's add an ontological component to a dictionary so you can look up things by meaning" more useful here if we want an intuition</div>
<div>on WordNet. Other resources (such as VerbNet or FrameNet) share the idea of having a dictionary joined with some conceptual data model, but have a focus on information</div><div>that is closer to linguistic properties than the sense relations of wordnets.</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><div>
I believe, that essentially my community is trying to understand,
what is currently going on and then model this in OWL, which is
similar to UML or ER-diagrams.</div></div></blockquote><div>... which is, again, commonsensical. If you want to model one resource in another framework, having a meta-model of the data helps. (meta-model sounds weird here because</div>
<div>usually the model is some SQL or class diagram, and the meta-model is the one that describes the structure of UML or ER models, again in a description formalism that could</div><div>be translated into UML or ER.)</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><div> Once you have it in OWL, you can
mix and merge and transform it into more efficient structures like
SQL (As John mentioned, Cyc is also providing these mappings and
it is easy to go down from rich knowledge). The quest therefore is
to encode human-knowledge into the data on a meta-level, i.e.
describing the data/resources not the world.</div></div></blockquote><div>I fully agree. (And, just to be extra-cautious, will point to the difference between meta-data and meta-models for linguistic models).</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><div>
We are in dire need of expert input, however. Hence my attempt to
cross-post.<br></div></div></blockquote><div>For my two cents: I think that many of the practical problems we're facing (as in: after we've got our data in RDF, can we query the data efficiently</div><div>and do we get the answers that we'd intuitively want), the general problems in knowledge-based AI have been around since ages, but now we have</div>
<div>specific instances of the problem that can tell us more about what kind of solution can be workable in practice, and where we'll certainly see a pattern</div><div>of early adopters (e.g. the WSD community, because having all your data in one place is great and you need some kind of graph but no reasoning in</div>
<div>a more extensive sense) and late adopters (e.g. people who make extensive use of relatedness measures or techniques that are both complicated and</div><div>performance-sensitive enough that it makes little sense to include them in a generic database).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Best wishes,</div><div>Yannick</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><div>
<br>
All the best,<br>
Sebastian<div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 08.08.2014 09:52, <a href="mailto:yversley@gmail.com" target="_blank">yversley@gmail.com</a> wrote:<br>
</div></div></div><div><div class="h5">
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr" style="font-family:'Calibri','Segoe UI','Meiryo','Microsoft YaHei UI','Microsoft JhengHei UI','Malgun Gothic','sans-serif';font-size:12pt">
<div>Dear Sebastian,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>let me start out by saying that including that I’m not sure
if broadening an already diffuse discussion by adding more
people to it is helpful in the sense of achieving a better
signal-to-noise ratio. Corpora-List is (in)famous for
occasionally having discussions between people with very
different background assumptions (e.g. Ramesh’s insistence
that language is best seen as behaviour vs. the point that
language is a tool to get meanings across). This can be both
good and bad, and lots of people who are only interested in
factual information did or will hit the “Mute thread" button
(or moral equivalent) in the process.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Your whole post seems to boil down to a claim that only
RDF-encoded data should count as ontology. This seems to be a
bit near-sighted to me, as LemonRDF’s encoding of WordNet is
just that, an encoding which is very convenient but which adds
nothing to the existing semantics.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I completely agree that using a powerful database (be it
RDF or SQL or anything else) is better than using the 90s
infrastructure that was once designed for Wordnet, and that
linking datasets together is much easier with a common format
thst reduces the m:n problem to an 1:n problem.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>We already established earlier that WordNet is a
combination between a dictionary and an ontological component,
which is exactly why it’s more useful for NLP than the
ontologies that were part of the original conception of the
Semantic Web. Fortunately for us though, people woke up to
that idea and resources such as DBPedia now also include
dictionary entries that mediate between natural-language
strings and the concepts of the respective ontology.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Saying that some people think that “the ontology is already
in the text" is unnecessarily putting up a strawman. No one
claimed this, and you’d do better by understanding the actual
arguments put forward - for example, that in the absence of a
central authority, as with marriage or taxonomies in Biology,
ontologies are conceptualizations that are intersubjective
rather than purely objective. E.g. Kafka may be a German
writer in one ontology and a Czech writer in another, yet
either of these ontologies would be useful and intuitively
plausible. (This creates a tension/incompatibility between the
perspective that ontologies are logical things and that you
should be able to reason with them, and the view that you
should be able to freely combine ontologies on related
things.)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Your discussion of layers is absolutely orthogonal to that
- modeling text, annotations, metadata, and ontology in one
database is surely convenient if you can make it work in a
sense that's practically relevant but it doesn’t add anything
to the discussion we’re having here.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Best wishes,</div>
<div>Yannick</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div style="padding-top:5px;border-top-color:rgb(229,229,229);border-top-width:1px;border-top-style:solid">
<div><font face=" 'Calibri', 'Segoe UI', 'Meiryo', 'Microsoft YaHei
UI', 'Microsoft JhengHei UI', 'Malgun Gothic',
'sans-serif'"><b>Von:</b> <a href="mailto:hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de" target="_blank">Sebastian Hellmann</a><br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Freitag, 8. August 2014 09:35<br>
<b>An:</b> <a href="mailto:sowa@bestweb.net" target="_blank">John F
Sowa</a>, <a href="mailto:corpora@uib.no" target="_blank">corpora</a>,
<a href="mailto:open-linguistics@lists.okfn.org" target="_blank">A list for those interested in open
data in linguistics.</a>, <a href="mailto:nlp2rdf@lists.informatik.uni-leipzig.de" target="_blank">nlp2rdf</a></font></div>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div dir="">
<div>Dear all,<br>
(I included some more lists to ping them, discussion started
here: <a href="http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2014-August/020939.html" target="_blank">http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2014-August/020939.html</a>)<br>
<br>
I see that there are many viewpoints on this issue in this
thread.<br>
So let me add my personal biased view.<br>
<br>
In the broadest sense, we start to create an ontology by
stating facts:<br>
<br>
married (a, b) . <br>
<br>
Imho we have an ontology, solely for the reason, that we
start to relate a to b with "married" . Even if there is not
an explicit ontology defining "married", it is still used in
an "ontological" way, just not explicit. There are other
aspects missing, which have been discussed throughout the
literature (i.e. the fact that it must be "shared" by
Gruber), but in the broadest sense, it qualifies. <br>
<br>
Regarding language technology and this discussion, I would
say that we should be careful not to mix levels. This is
done by lexical-semantic resources, i.e. WordNet, but we
could separate it again. <br>
<br>
In my view, we have these different layers:<br>
<br>
1. the content, i.e. the characters (html, plaintext), e.g
in unicode.<br>
2. the container of the content, i.e. document or tweet<br>
3. annotations on the content<br>
4. metadata on the container, e.g. the tweeter or author for
context<br>
5. collection of content (with or without annotations) i.e.
the corpora<br>
6. ontologies and data describing language, i.e. lexica,
dictionaries, terminologies, etc. such as WordNet<br>
7. factual databases inluding their taxonomies, i.e. the
DBpedia knowledge graph <a href="http://dbpedia.org" target="_blank">http://dbpedia.org</a><br>
<br>
(@John: I hope you are noticing, that I am trying to be keep
all of it as underspecified as possible)<br>
<br>
Then in addition, there are ontologies on a meta-level that
try to capture all seven layers. Some examples (more below):
NIF, lemon, ITS, NERD [1]<br>
which we are trying to combine in the <a href="http://nlp2rdf.org" target="_blank">http://nlp2rdf.org</a>
and <a href="http://lider-project.eu" target="_blank">http://lider-project.eu</a>
<br>
<br>
We can model WordNet using the lemon ontology: <a href="http://datahub.io/dataset/lemonwordnet" target="_blank">http://datahub.io/dataset/lemonwordnet</a><br>
However for certain purposes, it makes sense to transform
WordNet to become a taxonomy as YAGO is doing:<br>
<a href="https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/databases-and-information-systems/research/yago-naga/yago/" target="_blank">https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/databases-and-information-systems/research/yago-naga/yago/</a><br>
<br>
I am not fixed upon any of the definitions I gave above, as
I am aware that you can and should! transform one in the
other (with some effort, e.g. corpora to dictionary, fact
extraction, language generation).<br>
<br>
If we are talking about extracting ontologies from text,
there might be philosophical people who might want to argue
that the ontology is already in the text. Discussion can be
endless, if you take the wrong linguistic turn.<br>
<br>
If we are focusing on engineering of information machines,
then things are much clearer. <br>
<br>
All the best, <br>
Sebastian<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
[1] related to the different layers:<br>
1. NIF: <a href="http://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/ontologies/nif-core#" target="_blank">http://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/ontologies/nif-core#</a><br>
2. (there is a gap here, Dublin Core or Foaf are not enough
imho)<br>
3 a) MARL: <a href="http://www.gi2mo.org/marl/0.1/ns.html" target="_blank">http://www.gi2mo.org/marl/0.1/ns.html</a><br>
b) ITS: Docu: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/</a>
, RDF: <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its/rdf#" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its/rdf#</a><br>
c) OLIA: <a href="http://purl.org/olia/" target="_blank">http://purl.org/olia/</a><br>
4. a) Dublin Core: <a href="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/" target="_blank">http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/</a><br>
b) Prov-O: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/</a><br>
5. also NIF: <a href="http://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/ontologies/nif-core#" target="_blank">http://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/ontologies/nif-core#</a><br>
6. lemon: <a href="http://lemon-model.net/" target="_blank">http://lemon-model.net/</a><br>
7. a) DCAT and DataId: <a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/coop/DataIDUnit" target="_blank">http://wiki.dbpedia.org/coop/DataIDUnit</a><br>
b) NERD: <a href="http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology" target="_blank">http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 08.08.2014 06:11, John F Sowa wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">On 8/7/2014 10:57
PM, Ken Litkowski wrote: <br>
<blockquote style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">It
would seem to me that our goal should be a classification
<br>
of all existing things (not to exclude the narrower
types). <br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Yes, but note the slides I suggested in my first note: <br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/kdptut.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/kdptut.pdf</a>
<br>
<br>
Slides 7 to 9: Cyc project. 30 years of work (since 1984).
<br>
After the first 25 years, 100 million dollars and 1000
person-years <br>
of work (one person-millennium!), 600,000 concepts, defined
by <br>
5,000,000 axioms, organized in 6,000 microtheories -- and
counting. <br>
<br>
Slide 10: 2300 years of universal ontology schemes -- and
counting. <br>
<br>
<blockquote style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">The
Brandeis Shallow Ontology attempts to do this, and
incidentally <br>
is being used to characterize arguments of verbs in
Patrick Hanks <br>
corpus pattern analysis, i.e., in the imperfect world of
language. <br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I strongly believe in shallow, underspecified ontologies --
especially <br>
when they're supplemented with lots of lexical information
about verbs <br>
and their characteristic patterns. <br>
<br>
But I also believe that the key to having an open-ended
variety of <br>
specialized ontologies is to make the computers do what
people do: <br>
extend their ontologies automatically by reading books. <br>
<br>
Lenat made the mistake of assuming that you need to
hand-code <br>
a huge amount of knowledge before a system can start to read
<br>
by itself. But that's wrong. You need to design a system
that <br>
can automatically augment its ontology every step of the
way. <br>
<br>
John <br>
<br>
_______________________________________________ <br>
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<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<div>-- <br>
<small>Sebastian Hellmann<br>
AKSW/NLP2RDF research group<br>
Insitute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) and DBpedia
Association<br>
Events: <br>
* <b>Sept. 1-5, 2014</b> Conference Week in Leipzig,
including <br>
** <b>Sept 2nd</b>, <a href="http://mlode2014.nlp2rdf.org/" target="_blank">MLODE
2014</a> <br>
** <b>Sept 3rd</b>, <a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/Leipzig2014" target="_blank">2nd DBpedia Community Meeting</a><br>
** <b>Sept 4th-5th</b>, <a href="http://semantics.cc/" target="_blank">SEMANTiCS
(formerly i-SEMANTICS) </a><br>
Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: <a href="http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf" target="_blank">http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf</a><br>
Projects: <a href="http://dbpedia.org" target="_blank">http://dbpedia.org</a>,
<a href="http://nlp2rdf.org" target="_blank">http://nlp2rdf.org</a>, <a href="http://linguistics.okfn.org" target="_blank">http://linguistics.okfn.org</a>,
<a href="http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt" target="_blank">https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt</a><br>
Homepage: <a href="http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann" target="_blank">http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann</a><br>
Research Group: <a href="http://aksw.org" target="_blank">http://aksw.org</a><br>
Thesis:<br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis-summary" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis-summary</a><br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis</a><br>
</small></div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<div>-- <br>
<small>Sebastian Hellmann<br>
AKSW/NLP2RDF research group<br>
Insitute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) and DBpedia Association<br>
Events: <br>
* <b>Sept. 1-5, 2014</b> Conference Week in Leipzig, including
<br>
** <b>Sept 2nd</b>, <a href="http://mlode2014.nlp2rdf.org/" target="_blank">MLODE
2014</a> <br>
** <b>Sept 3rd</b>, <a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/Leipzig2014" target="_blank">2nd
DBpedia Community Meeting</a><br>
** <b>Sept 4th-5th</b>, <a href="http://semantics.cc/" target="_blank">SEMANTiCS
(formerly i-SEMANTICS) </a><br>
Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: <a href="http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf" target="_blank">http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf</a><br>
Projects: <a href="http://dbpedia.org" target="_blank">http://dbpedia.org</a>,
<a href="http://nlp2rdf.org" target="_blank">http://nlp2rdf.org</a>, <a href="http://linguistics.okfn.org" target="_blank">http://linguistics.okfn.org</a>,
<a href="http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt" target="_blank">https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt</a><br>
Homepage: <a href="http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann" target="_blank">http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann</a><br>
Research Group: <a href="http://aksw.org" target="_blank">http://aksw.org</a><br>
Thesis:<br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis-summary" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis-summary</a><br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis</a><br>
</small></div>
</div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div></div>