[Attempto] reuse existing ontologies with Ace View ?

[Kaarel Kaljurand]

Hi,

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 16:51, Jean-Marc Vanel <jeanmarc.vanel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/4/19 Kaarel Kaljurand <kaljurand at gmail.com>
>>
>> ACE doesn't provide support for namespaces, i.e. all the content words
>> used in a sentence refer to the same default namespace. Therefore
>> it is not possible to write something like:
>>
>> (1) Every my:person is a foaf:Person and every foaf:Person is a my:person.
>>
>> We have been thinking about adding namespaces support but haven't
>> found a natural (English-like) representation for that.
>> Do you have any ideas or preferences?
>
> Looking at my (french) keyboard , I propose "|" as a separator between a
> RDF/N3 prefix  and the significant part, and so (1) would become :
> Every person is a foaf|Person and every foaf|Person is a person .
> Internally, it could expand to full IRI, like you propose below.
> Comments:
> It 's too bad that ":" is already taken , but it is well-established in NLP
> for prefixing word nature . I think that using a yet unused separator will
> bring no problem anywhere. The only other character I see, that has no NLP
> or mathematical meaning would be "~" .
> The other question is: how to specifiy the prefixes to APE and ACE View ?
> For APE, a new argument is possible.
> For ACE View, ideally, the prefixes declared in Protégé should be reused.

I think it's possible to implement the namespace prefix support in ACE View
but leave ACE/APE unchanged (at least for the time being), i.e. it would be
an ACE View specific extension to ACE.
I'm not sure which symbol to use as the prefix separator,
maybe ':' can be reused. Note that ':' is not really part of the ACE language,
it's more like a feature of APE to allow for a quick and dirty specification
of word classes (the preferred way is to use the user lexicon).

The solution is detailed in:

http://code.google.com/p/aceview/issues/detail?id=4

but I'll have time to work on it only in the autumn.

Greetings from Berastagi,
Kaarel