Type of site | Ontology |
---|---|
Owner | Birzeit University |
Created by | Mustafa Jarrar |
URL |
ontology |
Commercial | No |
Launched | 2018-09-25 |
Content license | copyright |
Arabic Ontology is a linguistic ontology for the Arabic language, which can be used as an Arabic WordNet with ontologically clean content. People use it also as a tree (i.e. classification) of the concepts/meanings of the Arabic terms. It is a formal representation of the concepts that the Arabic terms convey, and its content is ontologically well-founded, and benchmarked to scientific advances and rigorous knowledge sources rather than to speakers' naïve beliefs as wordnets typically do [1] . [2] The Ontology tree can be explored online. [1]
The ontology structure (i.e., data model) is similar to WordNet structure. Each concept in the ontology is given a unique concept identifier (URI), informally described by a gloss, and lexicalized by one or more of synonymous lemma terms. Each term-concept pair is called a sense, and is given a SenseID. A set of senses is called synset. Concepts and senses are described by further attributes such as era and area - to specify when and where it is used, lexicalization type, example sentence, example instances, ontological analysis, and others. Semantic relations (e.g., SubTypeOf, PartOf, and others) are defined between concepts. Some important individuals are included in the ontology, such as individual countries and seas. These individuals are given separate IndividualIDs and linked with their concepts through the InstanceOf relation.
Concepts in the Arabic Ontology are mapped to synsets in WordNet, as well as to BFO and DOLCE. Terms used in the Arabic Ontology are mapped to lemmas in the LDC's SAMA database.
The Arabic Ontology can be seen as a next generation of WordNet - or as an ontologically clean Arabic WordNet. It follows the same structure (i.e., data model) as WordNet, and it is fully mapped to WordNet. However, there are critical foundational differences between them:
The Arabic Ontology can be used in many application domains; such as:
The URLs in the Arabic Ontology are designed according to the W3C's Best Practices for Publishing Linked Data, as described in the following URL schemes. This allows one to also explore the whole database like exploring a graph: