Implementing the GOLD Ontology in FIELD

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Implementing the GOLD Ontology in FIELD

• A user perspective

Laura Buszard-Welcher EMELD / WSU lbwelch_at_wayne.e
du
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Building an Ontology

• Top down approach
• Add everything we can think of
• Bottom up approach
• Search through grammars to find things we might
  not have thought of
• Have field linguists test the ontology to see if
  it can accommodate the languages they study

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Expected Change in Number of Added Concepts
During Test Phase
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Ontological concepts added to accommodate aspects
of Potawatomi inflection

• Animacy
• Person obviative
• Case non-grammatical diminutive, pejorative,
  locative
• Polarity positive and negative
• Clause type main and subordinate

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Anticipating Gaps

• Tools like FIELD and ELAN can be very useful for
  expanding an ontology bottom up
• However, GOLD is not currently extensible by the
  user within FIELD
• These tools should have a built-in means of
  facilitating communication between the user and
  the ontology design team

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Square Peg, Round Hole Issues
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The concept is there, but isnt a best fit

• User A committed to the tool, not in a hurry
• contact the ontology team to work out the issue
• User B committed to the tool, in a hurry
• use the term, dont contact the ontology team
• User C not committed to the tool, not in a
  hurry
• dont use the tool, maybe send a message to the
  ontology team
• User D not committed to the tool, in a hurry
• See ya!
• Retain users and make the relationship most
  productive by allowing comments to be added to
  every mapping in the language setup

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Mystery Morphemes
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Other Idiosyncracies of Inflection
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Collapsed Paradigms in FIELD
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User-Defined Subcategories

• Allow users to define language-specific
  subcategories within defined ontological mappings
• Comment fields would allow the user to specify
  the reason for the subcategory
• This allows for limited user extensibility
• Problem how do you constrain this?
• Communication interface and monitoring would
  allow ontology team to examine and study these
  subcategories to determine whether they should be
  incorporated into the ontology.