John, (01)
Comments below. (02)
Thanks,
Leo (03)
JOHN:
The distinction between natural language terminologies and
formal ontologies is clear in the abstract. But when we start
using ontologies to analyze NL texts, we run into very serious
issues that blur those distinctions. (04)
[LEO:] Of course there is a continuum working here, as is usual, but there can
be discrete points in that continuum, which act as clarifying spikes or
way-stations. Subatomic physics to psychology is a continuum, but we wouldn't
want to dispense with most of physics, chemistry, biology, neurophysiology,
cognitive science, etc. (05)
However, there are typically clear differences between controlled vocabularies
and thesauri, on the one hand, and ontologies, on the other. "Narrower than" is
not the same as "Subclass of", and if folks model the former as an OWL subclass
relation, the inferences are too strong to warrant. You can convert a thesaurus
into and OWL ontology, but you should be careful how you do it. There was an
early paper on this, before the development of SKOS as a
terminology/vocabulary/KOS standard: (06)
van Assem, Mark; Maarten R. Menken; Guus Schreiber; Jan Wielemaker; and Bob
Wielinga. 2004. A Method for Converting Thesauri to RDF/OWL. International
Semantic Web Conference, 2004 (ISWC2004), 7-11 Nov. 2004, Hiroshima, Japan.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark/papers/Assem04a.pdf. (07)
Other papers address the "ontologization" of WordNet, which is primarily a
lexical resource and an enhanced thesaurus, not an ontology, as you know
yourself, John: (08)
Gangemi, Aldo; Nicola Guarino; Claudio Masolo; Alessandro Oltramari.
Sweetening WORDNET with DOLCE. 2003. AI Magazine, Volume 24 , Issue 3
(September 2003) pp. 13-24. http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html. (09)
Oltramari, A., Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Masolo, C. 2002. Restructuring
WordNet's Top-Level: The OntoClean approach. In K. Simov (ed.) Workshop
Proceedings of OntoLex'2, Ontologies and Lexical Knowledge Bases, LREC2002, Las
Palmas, Spain, May 27, 2002, pp. 17-26. (010)
JOHN:
This thread began with a discussion of the differences between
SKOS and OWL, and I maintained that it's impossible to draw a
sharp line between SKOS terminologies OWL ontologies. (011)
[LEO:] No, it is possible, and in fact, should be done. (012)
JOHN:
For anybody who has read my article, I'd add the following point:
each term that might be represented in SKOS could be used in an
open-ended number of Wittgensteinian Satzsysteme or Sprachspiele,
each of which could be formalized by a different ontology in the
infinite lattice. One might use OWL to formalize those theories,
but I would recommend a more expressive version of logic. (013)
[LEO:] Of course one can express all of this in a first-order (or higher)
logic, terminologies and ontologies, but knowledge representation languages
"chunk" the expressed content. That's just a fact of life in information
systems. You of course can complain about the built-in class theories of a
particular KR language (as we do), and the decreased expressivity some KR
languages force us into in their quest to achieve certain formal properties of
the language and to assist in tractable reasoning (and we do). We could just
proclaim a manifesto that from now on, all expressions of logical content will
just be expressed in classical first order logic, and no knowledge
representation languages will be used. But my guess is that no one will come to
our party. (014)
John (015)
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