Bilal Gonen

CSCI 8351

 

 

WordNet is an online dictionary that you can explore in different directions, finding words that mean the same, are more general, more specific - as well as getting a brief description.

I downloaded and then installed WordNet Package (Windows Database Package). When I typed "apple" in the search box in "WordNet 2.0 Browser". The results returned were;

1. (2) apple -- (fruit with red or yellow or green skin and sweet to tart crisp whitish flesh)
2. apple, orchard apple tree, Malus pumila -- (native Eurasian tree widely cultivated in many varieties for its firm rounded edible fruits)

Under the "Noun" button there are several options i.e.

Each options gives different way of results. For example, Hypernyms (apple is a kind of...) options returns;

apple -- (fruit with red or yellow or green skin and sweet to tart crisp whitish flesh)
    => edible fruit -- (edible reproductive body of a seed plant especially one having sweet flesh)
        => produce, green goods, green groceries, garden truck -- (fresh fruits and vegetable grown for the market)
            => food -- (any solid substance (as opposed to liquid) that is used as a source of nourishment; "food and drink")
                => solid -- (a substance that is solid at room temperature and pressure)
                    => substance, matter -- (that which has mass and occupies space; "an atom is the smallest indivisible unit of matter")
                        => entity -- (that which is perceived or known or inferred to have its own distinct existence (living or nonliving))

WordNet is an ontology that includes more than 42,000 new links between nouns and verbs that are morphologically related, a topical organization for many areas that classifies synsets by category, region, or usage, gloss and synset fixes, and new terminology, mostly in the terrorism domain.

Wordnet is a valuable tool for the semantic web. The current service is based solely on the noun term hierarchy from Wordnet. The hypernym hierarchy (a ___ is a kind of ___) is projected into an RDF Schema 1.0 class hierarchy (the ___ class is an rdfs:subClassOf the class ___). This creates a rather large class hierarchy.

We can address each noun from Wordnet using Web identifiers (URIs) of the form: http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/xxx where 'xxx' is a word such as 'Cat', 'Tree', 'Person'.

We can import this vocabulary into RDF instance data, for example by writing xmlns:wordnet="http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/"

Having done this, we can use any noun from Wordnet as an RDF class (ie. type). Since RDF syntax provides a special convention for writing class names as XML elements, this can be rather useful.

Also we can add a new entry to the WordNet bibliography.