[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[Rich Cooper]

Whatever happened to VerbNet?  Are they still
operating, and has it gotten very far with users
yet?

-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no
[mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of John
F Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2014 5:37 AM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

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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