[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[Obrst, Leo J.]

WordNet is more of a lexical resource, i.e., a thesaurus, whereas ontologies are a "conceptual" resource. WordNet does go beyond the usual thesaurus, hence the usual confusion.

Yes, think of an ontology class name (as in OWL ontologies, other FOL ontologies are somewhat different) as being just a symbol (e.g., the OBO ontologies use a kind of gensymed URI/IRI), with actual natural language labels, and altLabels (from SKOS, a W3C standard for controlled vocabularies, thesauri, etc.) as being the actual names in various natural languages. Most OWL ontologies use an actual natural language "name" for ontology classes and properties, contrary to this practice, just for ease of human ontologist usage. But one can think of many different vocabularies (e.g., distinct commmunities, distinct natural languages, etc., say, modeled in SKOS) as mapping to the same ontology.

Thanks,
Leo

>-----Original Message-----
>From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf
>Of Robert A. Amsler
>Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2014 11:11 AM
>To: liling tan
>Cc: corpora at uib.no
>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology
>
>No, WordNet is not an ontology. Wordnet is a tangled hierarchy. A taxonomy
>that allows multiple upward paths from a given node. Ontologies are the
>result of logic being enforced on nodes and relationships that may use
>natural language words as their names. One of their primary functions is
>to eliminate ambiguity by narrowing down the meanings of words to
>precisely what they want the words to mean. This allow enforcement of
>useful computational properties, such as predictable relationships and
>inheritance of relationships, well-defined relationships between concepts,
>etc.
>
>The loss is that ontologies may no longer represent natural language
>although they "look" as though they do because they use natural language
>words as nodes. Using an ontology should come with a warning that once you
>start using the ontology you are committing to acceptance of its formal
>definitions of the meanings of the words in the ontology.
>
>One could almost consider ontologies to be the equivalent of artificial
>languages.
>
>
>
>> Dear corpora linguists,
>>
>> There is recently a discussion on stackoverflow about "wordnet vs
>> ontology". I would like your perspective on several issues about wordnet
>> and ontology:
>>
>> - Is wordnet an ontology? If it is not an ontology, what is it?
>>
>> - What is the definition of an ontology? Is anything
>> (words/concept/entities) under a hierarchical structure some sort of
>> linguistic ontology?
>>
>> - Are linguistic onotology / information science ontology subjected to
>> only
>> upper and domain ontology?
>>
>> - Any other comments about ontology and wordnet?
>>
>> Regards,
>> liling
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>
>
>
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