UNL Ontology

The UNL Ontology, also known as the UW System, is a tree-like structure where UWs are interconnected through ontological relations: icl (is-a-kind-of), iof (is-an-instance-of), equ (is-equivalent-to) and pof (is-a-part-of). The UNL Ontology is claimed to improve the results of the enconversion process, as it can be used as a word sense disambiguation strategy; and the deconversion results, as it would compensate dictionary limitations.

Syntax

The UNL Ontology is a plain text file with a single entry per line. There are two possible representations for UNL Ontology entries: they can be either represented as Master Definitions or as UNL Knowledge Base entries.

When represented as UNLKB entries, the UNL Ontology entries have the following format:

<UNL Ontology entry>	::=	<binary relation>"="<degree of certainty>
<binary relation>	::=	{icl, iof, equ, pof} "(" <source node> "," <target node> ")"
<source node>	::=	any existing UW
<target node>	::=	any existing UW
<degree of certainty>	::=	{0,1}

Where:
0 = false
255 = true

Examples

For the time being, there are two different UNL ontologies:

• The UNL Centre's Official Dictionary

A list of UWs provided by the UNL Centre (here presented as a part of the UNL Knowledge Base)

• The UNL WordNet 2.1 Dictionary

A list of UWs extracted out of the English WordNet2.1