[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[John F Sowa]

On 8/6/2014 5:57 AM, liling tan wrote:
> Is wordnet an ontology? If it is not an ontology, what is it?

WordNet is widely used as a resource for developing and relating
ontologies in AI, computational linguistics, and the Semantic Web.

But most projects in those fields distinguish lexical resources,
such as WordNet, from the formal ontologies that are specified
in some version of logic.

> What is the definition of an ontology? Is anything
> (words/concept/entities) under a hierarchical structure
> some sort of linguistic ontology?

In philosophy, ontology is the study of existence.  In computational
systems, *an* ontology is a collection of formally defined terms
that characterize the entities that exist in some domain and the
relationships among those entities.

WordNet, Roget's Thesaurus, dictionaries, terminologies, and other
lexical resources focus on words in various languages.  They are
valuable as a starting point for the analysis required to state
formal specifications.  But much more analysis is needed to refine
those definitions for a particular theory of ontology.

> Are linguistic ontology / information science ontology
> subjected to only upper and domain ontology?

There is no consensus about how linguistic resources can or
should be related to formal ontologies or how either kind
of resource should be structured.

But it is common to have an underspecified upper level
for general terms and lower-level specializations (AKA
microtheories) for more specialized terms.  Some very large
system, such as Cyc, have an upper-level, mid-level, and
lower-level.

The categories in Cyc are rarely mapped to and from common
words that have a huge number of word senses.  They are more
likely to be mapped to word phrases or to very specialized
technical words.

> Any other comments about ontology and wordnet?

Following are the slides of a tutorial about ontology, logic,
and issues of relating them to language and computation:

http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/kdptut.pdf

John

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