WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary... from Dan Brickley on 1999-12-03 (www-rdf-interest@w3.org from December 1999)

<!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" /> <meta name="generator" content="hypermail 3.0.0, see https://github.com/hypermail-project/hypermail/" /> <title>WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary... from Dan Brickley on 1999-12-03 (www-rdf-interest@w3.org from December 1999)</title> <meta name="Author" content="Dan Brickley (danbri@w3.org)" /> <meta name="Subject" content="WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary..." /> <meta name="Date" content="1999-12-03" /> <link rel="stylesheet" title="Normal view" href="/assets/styles/public.css" /> <link rel="help" href="/Help/" /> <link rel="start" href="../" title="www-rdf-interest@w3.org archives" /> <script defer="defer" src="/assets/js/archives.js"></script> </head> <body class="message"> <header class="head"> <nav class="breadcrumb" id="upper"> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.w3.org/">W3C home</a></li> <li><a href="/">Mailing lists</a></li> <li><a href="../../">Public</a></li> <li><a href="../" rel="start">www-rdf-interest@w3.org</a></li> <li><a href="./" rel="contents">December 1999</a></li> </ul> </nav> <h1>WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary...</h1>            <nav id="navbar"> <ul class="links hmenu_container"> <li> <span class="heading">This message</span>: <ul class="hmenu"><li><a href="#start" id="options1">Message body</a></li> <li><a href="mailto:www-rdf-interest@w3.org?Subject=Re%3A%20WordNet%20in%20RDF%2FXML%3A%2050%2C000%2B%20RDF%20class%20vocabulary...&In-Reply-To=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E&References=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E">Respond</a></li> <li><a href="#options3">More options</a></li> </ul></li> <li> <span class="heading">Related messages</span>: <ul class="hmenu">  <li><a href="0003.html">Next message</a></li> <li><a href="0001.html">Previous message</a></li> <li><a href="0001.html">In reply to</a></li>  <li><a href="0003.html">Next in thread</a></li> <li><a href="#replies">Replies</a></li>  </ul></li> </ul> </nav> </header>  <main class="mail"> <ul class="headers" aria-label="message headers"> <li><span class="from"> <span class="heading">From</span>: Dan Brickley <<a href="mailto:danbri@w3.org?Subject=Re%3A%20WordNet%20in%20RDF%2FXML%3A%2050%2C000%2B%20RDF%20class%20vocabulary...&In-Reply-To=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E&References=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E">danbri@w3.org</a>> </span></li> <li><span class="date"><span class="heading">Date</span>: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 20:20:55 -0500 (EST)</span></li> <li><span class="to"><span class="heading">To</span>: <a href="mailto:www-rdf-interest@w3.org?Subject=Re%3A%20WordNet%20in%20RDF%2FXML%3A%2050%2C000%2B%20RDF%20class%20vocabulary...&In-Reply-To=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E&References=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E">www-rdf-interest@w3.org</a> </span></li> <li><span class="cc"><span class="heading">cc</span>: <a href="mailto:wordnet@princeton.edu?Subject=Re%3A%20WordNet%20in%20RDF%2FXML%3A%2050%2C000%2B%20RDF%20class%20vocabulary...&In-Reply-To=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E&References=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E">wordnet@princeton.edu</a> </span></li> <li><span class="message-id"><span class="heading">Message-ID</span>: <Pine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000@tux.w3.org> </span></li> </ul> <pre id="start" class="body"> RDF IG, I've been trying and failing to find time to write up my WordNet/RDF experiments. Instead, I thought I'd post as-is what I currently have working. Code to follow after minor cleanup. Context: WordNet is a large lexical database, consisting of 10s of thousands of commonsense English concepts. The WordNet site contains a wealth more information, including links to WordNet's use in the information retrieval and digital library community, as well as to spin-offs like EuroWordNet, which maps the WordNet vocabulary to non-English languages. See <a href="http://cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/">http://cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/</a> I'm very interested in the potential of WordNet for 'semantic web' applications, not least because the data is available unencumbered for commercial and noncommercial use. So, I spent a little time thinking about how WordNet can be mapped into RDF. There appears to be a trivial mapping from the 'noun' portion of the WordNet database to a hierarchy of RDF classes. I've not investigated models for representing the other aspects of WordNet yet. Here's an example of the output from a commandline version: [danbri]% wn tree -hypen|more Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Frequency) of noun tree 2 senses of tree Sense 1 tree => woody plant, ligneous plant => vascular plant, tracheophyte => plant, flora, plant life => life form, organism, being, living thing => entity, something Sense 2 tree, tree diagram => plane figure, two-dimensional figure => figure => shape, form => attribute => abstraction Each 'word sense' in WordNet's collection of nouns can, I believe, simply be mapped into RDF's notion of a class. For eg., 'tree' in sense one above would be the class of all trees (ie. a subset of all the woody plants). If we give URIs to these classes, eg. <a href="http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/tree~1">http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/tree~1</a> we can use them as an RDF vocabulary, and represent the wordnet hierarchy as sub-class relationships. I've rigged up a simple prototype (a tiny Perl CGI script) which wraps WordNet in a WWW interface such that, given a term and a sense number (eg. 'tree' sense '1') it returns an RDF description of that part of the WordNet type hierarchy. The particular strategy I adopted (which you can see if you look at <a href="http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/woody_plant~1">http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/woody_plant~1</a> or other URIs on my test server) is for a class URI to dereference to a sparse description of the superclasses and a verbose description of the immediate subclasses. I suspect this is back to front. Anyway, comments welcomed. See the official wordnet site for a human-oriented HTML forms interface to the dataset, or simply guess URLs for my server (if you guess a word not in the database, you get an empty RDF graph). more examples: <a href="http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/cat~1">http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/cat~1</a> <a href="http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/cat~2">http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/cat~2</a> (ie. sense 2 of cat) <a href="http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/geek~1">http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/xmlns/wordnet/noun/geek~1</a> If there were an agreed URI for WordNet, instance data could look like this...  <rdf:Description> <WordNet:bitmap~1 rdf:about=""> <dc:subject> <WordNet:geek~1" rdf:about="<a href="http://purl.org/people/danbri">http://purl.org/people/danbri</a>"/> </dc:subject> </WordNet:bitmap~1> </rdf:Description> This says, 'this object is a member of the class of bitmaps; it has at its subject another object of type 'geek', whose URI is (etc...). So we might immediately think about using WordNet inside multimedia content, PNG/JPEG/GIF etc to improve accessibility and searchability of the content. The RDF type hierarchy I exposed tells us in RDF that bitmaps are a kind of picture which are a kind of representation etc., and gives simple definitions for each (eg. "an image represented as a two dimensional array of brightness values for pixels"). Similarly for geeks being kinds of persons etc... I think there are a few glitches in my online demo, but it should be enough to give a flavour of the possibilities. Comments, suggestions etc welcomed, Dan -- <a href="mailto:danbri@w3.org?Subject=Re%3A%20WordNet%20in%20RDF%2FXML%3A%2050%2C000%2B%20RDF%20class%20vocabulary...&In-Reply-To=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E&References=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E">danbri@w3.org</a> </pre> <p class="received"><span class="heading">Received on</span> Thursday, 2 December 1999 20:20:57 UTC</p> </main>  <footer class="foot"> <nav id="navbarfoot"> <ul class="links hmenu_container"> <li><span class="heading">This message</span>: <span class="message_body"><a href="#start">Message body</a></span></li>  <li><span class="heading">Next message</span>: <a href="0003.html">Sergey Melnik: "Re: WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary..."</a></li> <li><span class="heading">Previous message</span>: <a href="0001.html">Jozef De Roo: "Euler proof mechanism"</a></li> <li><span class="heading">In reply to</span>: <a href="0001.html">Jozef De Roo: "Euler proof mechanism"</a></li>  <li><span class="heading">Next in thread</span>: <a href="0003.html">Sergey Melnik: "Re: WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary..."</a></li> <li id="replies"><span class="heading">Reply</span>: <a href="0003.html">Sergey Melnik: "Re: WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary..."</a></li> <li><span class="heading">Maybe reply</span>: <a href="0056.html">Richard Humpleman - SISA: "RE: WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary..."</a></li>  </ul> <ul class="links hmenu_container"> <li id="options3"><span class="heading">Mail actions</span>: <ul class="hmenu"><li><a href="mailto:www-rdf-interest@w3.org?Subject=Re%3A%20WordNet%20in%20RDF%2FXML%3A%2050%2C000%2B%20RDF%20class%20vocabulary...&In-Reply-To=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E&References=%3CPine.LNX.4.20.9912021941000.26095-100000%40tux.w3.org%3E">respond to this message</a></li> <li><a href="mailto:www-rdf-interest@w3.org">mail a new topic</a></li></ul></li> <li><span class="heading">Contemporary messages sorted</span>: <ul class="hmenu"><li><a href="index.html#msg2">by date</a></li> <li><a href="thread.html#msg2">by thread</a></li> <li><a href="subject.html#msg2">by subject</a></li> <li><a href="author.html#msg2">by author</a></li> </ul></li> <li><span class="heading">Help</span>: <ul class="hmenu"> <li><a href="/Help/" rel="help">how to use the archives</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?type-index=www-rdf-interest&index-type=t">search the archives</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> </nav>  <p class="colophon"> This archive was generated by <a href="https://github.com/hypermail-project/hypermail/">hypermail 3.0.0</a>: Thursday, 13 July 2023 17:27:08 UTC </p> </footer> </body> </html>

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WordNet in RDF/XML: 50,000+ RDF class vocabulary... from Dan Brickley on 1999-12-03 (www-rdf-interest@w3.org from December 1999)