[Developers] wordnet?

[Ed Summers]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Christopher R. Maden <crism at metaweb.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, another way of looking at it is that as you traverse link between
pools of data on the web-of-data you will encounter semantic-drift
[1]. The drift between some data set will be more than others.

I guess I just wanted to point out that the links were there if Joel
wanted to try using them. The YAGO folks have an interesting paper
that discusses how enhancing wikipedia data with linkages to wordnet
can prove useful.

//Ed

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change
[2] http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~suchanek/publications/www2007.pdf