[Developers] wordnet?

[Christopher R. Maden]

Ed Summers wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Joel Truher <joel at truher.org> wrote:
>> There appears to have been some discussion, over the years, of
>> integrating Wordnet with Freebase, but I haven't found any traces of
>> it.  Does anyone know if this is an active integration project, and if
>> so, what its status is?  My application has a need for Wordnet-ish
>> data, and it would be nice not to do the integration myself.
> 
> I'm not sure about your use case, but If you have the time/energy this
> might be an interesting linked-data experiment. Since dbpedia now has
> links to both Freebase [1] and to WordNet, you could theoretically use
> it to connect a Freebase resource with a Wordnet resource.

The problem that keeps stumping[*] people who take this on is that 
Freebase is language-independent, while WordNet is inherently 
linguistic.  The English word “dog” can’t just be attached to the 
Freebase topic for dog-the-animal; the first synset for “dog” in WordNet 
can be *connected* to it, but shouldn’t be overlapped with it.  There 
are things that can be said about “dog” that are not true of “chien” in 
French.

I would love to see this happen, but I am a little pessimistic.  Prove 
me wrong!

~Chris

[*] Perhaps “stumping” is too strong a word; rather, making it clear 
that this is a bigger job than they had thought.
-- 
Christopher R. Maden
Data Architect
Freebase.com: <URL: http://www.freebase.com/ >
Metaweb Technologes, Inc. <URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >