[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[shams]

some points :

> Isn't an ontology about 'reality', and a wordnet about 'natural 
> language'?
>
> Ontologies are impelled by taxonomic goals and logical relationships,
> whereas natural languages are a form of human *behaviour*, whereby
> their users seek to share and communicate with each other their own
> *experience* (of 'reality')?

natural language is something we use to communicate about realities so 
according to meaning triangle, language and reality are not independent.
ontologies contain concepts which are mental elements, they just refer 
to referents in the real world but we can not call them the reality.
they are just our vision or mentality about the reality which we refer 
to by natural language. this is why there are so many ontologies which 
should be mapped or aligned to let interoperability happen.

back to the main question, I would like to mention that terminological 
or lexical ontologies are a kind of ontologies whose concepts are 
lexicalized in a natural language. they do not necessarily contain 
axioms. by this definition wordnets are a kind of ontologies.
their nodes are actually concepts which are lexicalized by a set of 
words (synsets) and the relations among them are conceptual and semantic 
relations just like what we have in other ontologies. the only 
difference is that the relation types are limited which is not the main 
characteristic of wordnets. and any relation between synsets can be 
defined in wordnets as has been done in wordnets of some languages (such 
as Persian).
we have restrictions on nodes too. they should be able to be referred 
to by a word or a phrase in a language.

Best regards

M.Shamsfard
NLP Research Lab, Head.
Shahid Behehti University
--


On 2014-08-07 13:13, Krishnamurthy, Ramesh wrote:
> Isn't an ontology about 'reality', and a wordnet about 'natural 
> language'?
>
> Ontologies are impelled by taxonomic goals and logical relationships,
> whereas natural languages are a form of human *behaviour*, whereby
> their users seek to share and communicate with each other their own
> *experience* (of 'reality')?
>
> Language users are therefore not primarily motivated by taxonomic 
> goals
> or logical relationships, though elements of taxonomies and logic may 
> of
> course be observable in their language usage?
>
> The confusion arises because words from natural languages are used
> to name/describe the nodes and relationships in ontologies?
>
> Words in natural languages are dynamic contributors to a process of
> meaning creation which is strongly affected by the context of use.
>
> Hence using a dynamic variable (a word) to name fixed nodes and 
> stable
> relationships in ontologies is a rather impractical endeavour?
>
> best
> ramesh
>
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