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Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web pp 15–30Cite as

Design Patterns for Engineering the Ontology-Lexicon Interface

Abstract

In this paper, we combine two ideas: one is the recently identified need to extend ontologies with a richer lexical layer, and the other is the use of ontology design patterns for ontology engineering. We combine both to develop the first set of design patterns for ontology-lexica, using the ontology-lexicon model, lemon. We show how these patterns can be used to model nouns, verbs and adjectives and what implications these patterns impose on both the lexicon and the ontology. We implemented these patterns by means of a domain-specific language that can generate the patterns from a short description, which can significantly reduce the effort in developing ontology-lexica. We exemplify this with the use case of constructing a lexicon for the DBpedia ontology.

Key Words

  • Design patterns
  • Lexicon
  • Ontology
  • Ontology engineering
  • Ontology-lexica

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a complete list, see http://lemon-model.net/.

  2. 2.

    Note that properties may consist of chains of properties, giving multiple unbound arguments. In this case, OWL 2 property chains should be used to reduce to one unbound argument.

  3. 3.

    Depending on whether the argument of the noun is a prepositional object, as in “marriage with someone”, or also allows for a possessive construction, as in “a country’s capital”, the syntactic frame is specified either as NounPPFrame or as NounPossessiveFrame.

  4. 4.

    The oils name space is http://lemon-model.net/oils#.

  5. 5.

    For example, the state of being larger is atemporal for natural numbers but temporal for the height of children.

  6. 6.

    Of course, handling the non-monotonic natural of language would be desirable; however, the introduction of non-monotonicity should occur at the ontology level, by means of extensions to the OWL language.

  7. 7.

    In WALS this constitutes only 13 % of languages documented (Stassen 2011); however, as this includes the Romance and Germanic language families, we found this to be especially useful.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AG Semantic Computing, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    John P. McCrae & Christina Unger

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  1. John P. McCrae
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  2. Christina Unger
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Correspondence to Christina Unger .

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  1. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Paul Buitelaar

  2. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Philipp Cimiano

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McCrae, J.P., Unger, C. (2014). Design Patterns for Engineering the Ontology-Lexicon Interface. In: Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P. (eds) Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43585-4_2

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