Arabic Ontology is a linguistic ontology for the Arabic language, which can be used as an Arabic

Wordnet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short defin ...

with ontologically-clean content. People use it also as a tree (i.e. classification) of the concepts/meanings of the

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

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 . The Ontology tree can be explored online.

Ontology Structure

The ontology structure (i.e., data model) is similar to

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 A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the central nervous system re ...

, and is given a SenseID. A set of senses is called

synset In metadata, a synonym ring or synset, is a group of data elements that are considered semantically equivalent for the purposes of information retrieval. These data elements are frequently found in different metadata registries. Although a group ...

. 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 Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

(e.g., SubTypeOf, PartOf, and others) are defined between concepts. Some important

individuals An individual is that which exists as a distinct entity. Individuality (or self-hood) is the state or quality of being an individual; particularly (in the case of humans) of being a person unique from other people and possessing one's own need ...

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.

Mappings to other resources

Concepts in the Arabic Ontology are mapped to synsets in

, as well as to BFO and DOLCE. Terms used in the Arabic Ontology are mapped to lemmas in the LDC's SAMA database.

Arabic Ontology versus Arabic WordNet

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 ontology is benchmarked on state-of-art scientific discoveries, while WordNet is benchmarked on native-speakers’ naïve knowledge; # The ontology is governed by scientifically and philosophically well-established top levels; # Unlike WordNet, all concepts in the ontology are formal, i.e., a concept is a set of individuals (i.e., a class), thus concepts like (horizon) are not allowed in the ontology; and # Glosses in the ontology are strictly formulated, and focus on the distinguishing characteristics, which is not the case in WordNet.

Applications

The Arabic Ontology can be used in many application domains; such as: # Information retrieval, to enrich queries (e.g., in

search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

) and improve the quality of the results, i.e. meaningful search rather than string-matching search; #

Machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

and

word-sense disambiguation Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to consc ...

, by finding the exact mapping of concepts across languages, especially that the Arabic ontology is also mapped to the WordNet; #

Data Integration Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...

and

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...

in which the Arabic ontology can be used as a semantic reference to link databases and information systems; # Semantic Web and Web 3.0, by using the Arabic ontology as a semantic reference to disambiguate the meanings used in websites; among many other applications.

URLs Design

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: # Ontology Concept: Each concept in the Arabic Ontology has a ConceptID and can be accessed using: ''https:///concept/''. In case of a term, the set of concepts that this term lexicalizes are all retrieved. In case of a ConceptID, the concept and its direct subtypes are retrieved, e.g. https://ontology.birzeit.edu/concept/293198 # Semantic relations: Relationships between concepts can be accessed using these schemes: (i) the URL: ''https:// /concept//'' allows retrieval of relationships among ontology concepts. (ii) the URL: ''https:///lexicalconcept//'' allows retrieval of relations between lexical concepts. For example, https://ontology.birzeit.edu/concept/instances/293121 retrieves the instances of the concept 293121. The relations that are currently used in our database are: .

References

{{Reflist Knowledge representation Information science Ontology Ontology (information science) Arabic dictionaries Online dictionaries Lexical databases Computational linguistics Natural language processing Thesauri Birzeit University