Annotation schemes

One of the most important issues in terminology management is the ability to express the ownership and creation date of a lexicon and its entries. lemon has no mechanism of its own for performing this task instead, like many other RDF models it uses the Dublin Core vocabulary for this. The Dublin Core vocabulary allows the following to be stated:

• Creator: The creator of the given resource
• Description: A description of the resource. lemon:definition should be used for defining senses of lexical entries, dublincore:description for describing other parts of the model e.g., the lexicon object.
• Publisher: The publisher of the data
• Contributor: Any contributors to the given lexicon
• Date: The date a given resource was created
• Format: Generally should be specified as MIME. Use with care, as the format of the ontology may change.
• Identifier: An identifier of the lexicon or entry (useful if converting from another format)
• Source: The source of a given resource
• Coverage: The time and location covered by the resource (if relevant)
• Rights: Any copyright information

In addition, there are several annotations available in the OWL and RDF schemas that are useful for lexicon management

• owl:backwardCompatibleWith: The lexicon is compatible with some previous lexicon
• rdfs:comment: A comment about a resource
• owl:deprecated: Indicates the resource should not be used any more
• owl:incompatibleWith: The lexicon is incompatible with some previous lexicon
• rdfs:isDefinedBy: The resource is fully defined else where
• owl:priorVersion: Indicates an earlier version of the lexicon
• rdfs:seeAlso: Refer to another web resource
• owl:versionInfo: The version number of the lexicon

This information can of course simply be added as triples

@prefix dublincore: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2001/02/rdf-schema#>
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>

:myLexicon a lemon:Lexicon ;
   dublincore:creator "John McCrae" ;
   dublincore:date "2010-07-24"^^xsd:date ;
   rdfs:comment "An example lexicon from the lemon cookbook"@en ;
   lemon:language "en" ;
   lemon:entry :cat .
   
:cat a lemon:Word ;
   dublincore:creator "John McCrae" ;
   dublincore:date "2010-07-25"^^xsd:date ;
   rdfs:seeAlso "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat" ;
   lemon:canonicalForm [ lemon:writtenRep "cat"@en ] .
   .

Example 76

The use of these annotations is another reason why the ranges of many properties are resources instead of literals as expected. For example we could now easily state the source of a definition as follows.

:cat lemon:sense [ lemon:reference ontology:cat ; 
   lemon:definition [ 
      lemon:value "The cat is a small domesticated carnivorous animal"@en ;
      dublincore:source "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat" ]
    ] .

Example 77