Editing WordNet (section)

== As a lexical ontology ==
WordNet is sometimes called an ontology, a persistent claim that its creators do not make. The hypernym/hyponym relationships among the noun synsets can be interpreted as specialization relations among conceptual categories. In other words, WordNet can be interpreted and used as a lexical [[ontology (information science)|ontology]] in the [[computer science]] sense. However, such an ontology should be corrected before being used, because it contains hundreds of basic semantic inconsistencies; for example there are, (i) common specializations for exclusive categories and (ii) redundancies in the specialization hierarchy. Furthermore, transforming WordNet into a lexical ontology usable for knowledge representation should normally also involve (i)&nbsp;distinguishing the specialization relations into ''subtypeOf'' and ''instanceOf'' relations, and (ii)&nbsp;associating intuitive unique identifiers to each category. Although such corrections and transformations have been performed and documented as part of the integration of WordNet&nbsp;1.7 into the cooperatively updatable knowledge base of WebKB-2,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.webkb.org/doc/wn/ |title=Integration of WordNet 1.7 in WebKB-2|publisher=Webkb.org |access-date=2014-03-11}}</ref> most projects claiming to reuse WordNet for knowledge-based applications (typically, knowledge-oriented information retrieval) simply reuse it directly.

WordNet has also been converted to a formal specification, by means of a hybrid bottom-up top-down methodology to automatically extract association relations from it and interpret these associations in terms of a set of conceptual relations, formally defined in the [[Upper ontology#DOLCE|DOLCE foundational ontology]].<ref>{{cite book |first1=A. |last1=Gangemi |first2=R. |last2=Navigli |first3=P. |last3=Velardi |url=http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/WNET/ODBASE-OWN.pdf |title=The OntoWordNet Project: Extension and Axiomatization of Conceptual Relations in WordNet |work= Proc. of International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE 2003) |location=Catania, Sicily (Italy) |year=2003 |pages= 820–838}}</ref>

In most works that claim to have integrated WordNet into ontologies, the content of WordNet has not simply been corrected when it seemed necessary; instead, it has been heavily reinterpreted and updated whenever suitable. This was the case when, for example, the top-level ontology of WordNet was restructured<ref>{{cite conference | first1 = A. | last1 = Oltramari | first2 = A. | last2 = Gangemi | first3 = N. | last3 = Guarino | first4 = C. | last4 = Masolo | date = 2002 | title = Restructuring WordNet's Top-Level: The OntoClean approach | citeseerx = 10.1.1.19.6574 | conference = OntoLex'2 Workshop, Ontologies and Lexical Knowledge Bases (LREC 2002) | location = Las Palmas, Spain | pages = 17–26 }}</ref> according to the [[OntoClean]]-based approach, or when it was used as a primary source for constructing the lower classes of the SENSUS ontology.