At some stage it had to be. The semantic web, the holy grail of this digital age had to come my way. The sum of all knowledge is to be found by it. It is a great endeavour, many people work really hard to make it a reality and so far it passed me by.
I am happy that it passed me by until now. I am happy because in my ignorance I was able to come up with the Ultimate Wiktionary. Ultimate Wiktionary is in its own way equally ambitious; it wants to have all lexicological information on all words of all languages. Some people say that you cannot know a thing if you do not have a word for it..
The semantic web came my way in a meeting at the University of Rotterdam; they need a lexicological resource for a big thesaurus. They have experimented with products that are closely related to the semantic web.
What I have understood is that certain words are used in a tree of concepts, in order to make this information usable in other languages; these concepts have to be translated. In my opinion that is exactly what the Ultimate Wiktionary is intended to do. When a "concept" is associated with a particular "Meaning", it follows that the translations and synonyms can be used to present these relations in another languages.
I understand that there is this idea that a concept and the tag used in the relations is considered by some to be distinct. At this moment I think it is not really practical, It is great that I will learn more about the semantic web.
I am on record that when people try to find a use of the Ultimate Wiktionary that I did not consider, I would think the Ultimate Wiktionary a success. By that standard, even though it is not operational yet, it is doing well.
Thanks,
GerardM
2 comments:
I'm not sure how Ultimate Wiktionary would work as a Semantic Web resource, and the relational diagram at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:ERD.jpg is unclear. Do you plan to share "Meanings" across languages? Can you link Meanings in a semantic network (hyponimy, meronimy, near-synonymy, etc.), distinct from *lexical* relationships between words (etymology, cognates, derivation)?
Through the "SynTrans" table Meanings are shared across languages.
I do not know enough of the semantic web at this stage but, a RDF is a relation in three parts. This has always been part of the datadesign.
The Ultimate Wiktionary is intended to host thesauri and glossaries. GEMET will be the first data that we intent to have in the Ultimate Wiktionary. GEMET is the ecological thesaurus of the EU.
A distinction between lexical relationships and "semantic web" relationships seems to me to be artificial if the semantic web is to express relations between the knowledge that is there.
Thanks,
GerardM
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