Ontologizing Lexicon Access Functions based on an LMF-based Lexicon Taxonomy

This paper discusses ontologization of lexicon access functions in the context of a service-oriented language infrastructure, such as the Language Grid. In such a language infrastructure, an access function to a lexical resource, embodied as an atomic Web service, plays a crucially important role in composing a composite Web service tailored to a user’s specific requirement. To facilitate the composition process involving service discovery, planning and invocation, the language infrastructure should be ontology-based; hence the ontologization of a range of lexicon functions is highly required. In a service-oriented environment, lexical resources however can be classified from a service-oriented perspective rather than from a lexicographically motivated standard. Hence to address the issue of interoperability, the taxonomy for lexical resources should be ground to principled and shared lexicon ontology. To do this, we have ontologized the standardized lexicon modeling framework LMF, and utilized it as a foundation to stipulate the service-oriented lexicon taxonomy and the corresponding ontology for lexicon access functions. This paper also examines a possible solution to fill the gap between the ontological descriptions and the actual Web service API by adopting a W3C recommendation SAWSDL, with which Web service descriptions can be linked with the domain ontology.