UNL Ontology

The UNL Ontology, formerly known as the UW System, is a tree-like structure where UWs are interconnected through hierarchical relations: icl (is-a-kind-of) and iof (is-an-instance-of). Differently from the UNL Knowledge Base, which comprises any relation necessary to define a given UW, the UNL Ontology contains only monotonic relations, i.e., relations that preserve the features of their arguments, and that may be used for inheritance.

The UNL Ontology may be provided in two different formats:

• Extended, in XML; or
• Simplified, as a set of network disambiguation rules

Extended format

UNL Ontology entries in extended format must have the following structure:

<relation name="RNAME" type="RTYPE" frequency="RFREQ">
  <source id="SID" attribute="ATT" lang="UNL" frequency="SFREQ" class="SCLASS">SOURCE</source>
  <target id="TID" attribute="ATT" lang="UNL" frequency="TFREQ" class="TCLASS">TARGET</target>
</relation>

Where:
RNAME is either "icl" (is-a-kind-of) or "iof" (is-an-instance-of);
RTYPE is the type of the existing relation
RFREQ is either 0 (false) or 1 (true);
SFREQ is the frequency of the SOURCE in the corpus;
TFREQ is the frequency of the TARGET in the corpus;
SID is a number used to identify the SOURCE;
TID is a number used to identify the TARGET;
ATT is one of the existing UNL attributes ("entry", "past", etc);
SCLASS is the general class of the SOURCE;
TCLASS is the general class of the TARGET;
SOURCE is the source node of the UNL relation;
TARGET is the target node of the UNL relation;

XML Schema

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<xsd:schema attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" version="1.0" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
 <xsd:element name="ontology">
   <xsd:complexType>
     <xsd:sequence>
       <xsd:element maxOccurs="unbounded" name="relation">
         <xsd:complexType>
           <xsd:sequence>
             <xsd:element name="source">
               <xsd:complexType>
                 <xsd:attribute name="id" type="xsd:unsignedLong" use="required" />
                 <xsd:attribute name="attribute" type="xsd:string" use="optional" />
                 <xsd:attribute name="lang" type="xsd:string" use="optional" />
                 <xsd:attribute name="frequency" type="xsd:int" use="optional"/>
                 <xsd:attribute name="class" type="xsd:string" use="optional"/>
               </xsd:complexType>
             </xsd:element>
             <xsd:element name="target">
               <xsd:complexType>
                 <xsd:attribute name="id" type="xsd:unsignedLong" use="required"/>
                 <xsd:attribute name="attribute" type="xsd:string" use="optional" />
                 <xsd:attribute name="lang" type="xsd:string" use="optional"/>
                 <xsd:attribute name="frequency" type="xsd:int" use="optional"/>
                 <xsd:attribute name="class" type="xsd:string" use="optional"/>
               </xsd:complexType>
             </xsd:element>
           </xsd:sequence>
           <xsd:attribute name="name" type="xsd:string" use="required"/>
           <xsd:attribute name="type" type="xsd:string" use="optional"/>
           <xsd:attribute name="frequency" type="xsd:int" use="optional"/>
         </xsd:complexType>
       </xsd:element>
     </xsd:sequence>
   </xsd:complexType>
 </xsd:element>
</xsd:schema>

Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<ontology>
 <relation name="icl" frequency="1">
  <source id="410" attribute="entry" lang="UNL" frequency="20" class="nou">100001930</source>
  <target id="2243" lang="UNL" frequency="2" class="nou">100001740</target>
 </relation>
</ontology>

Simplified format

UNL Ontology entries in simplified format must have the structure of network disambiguation rules, as follows:

RELATION(SOURCE;TARGET)=DC;

Where:
RELATION is either "icl" or "iof";
SOURCE is the source UW of the UNL relation;
TARGET is the target UW of the UNL relation;
DC is either 0 (false) or 1 (true)

Examples

icl(<[[100001930]];[[100001740]])=1; (= a physical entity is a kind of entity)