Usage
The Language Ontology can be used to indicate the language capabilities of people and organizations, and the languages of works.
We want to be able to assert "Jane speaks english" or "Mike speaks very little spanish." There are three elements to such asstertions -- the person whose capability we are describing, the capability they have (proficient, basic, etc) and the language of the capability.
The capabilities of individuals to speak languages are "dispositions" in the Basic Formal Ontology. The dispositions used in the Language Ontology are from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
The languages are classes in the Language Ontology. Individuals of these classes are the languages spoken by individuals. The english Jane speaks is not the same entity as the language Mike speaks. They are both individuals of the class English.
The ontological assertions connecting a person to a capability with respect to a language are shown in figure 1 below.
In triples, we would say:
x a Person
y a Language_Capability
z a Language
x has_disposition y
y concretizes z
Organizations may have dispositions that are Language Capabilities, just as people do. In Figure 1, foaf:Person can be replaced with foaf:Organization.
Works are the outputs of processes. In such cases we can represent the language of the work as an instance of Language (the english of Shakespeare is not the english of a translation of Tolstoy), and the work is the output of a process. There may be many processes involved in the creation of a work, representing these is beyond the domain of the Language Ontology. See Figure 2 below.
In triples:
x a Document
y a Process
z a Language
x output_of Process
Process has_participant Language
- The Language Ontology uses standard BFO object properties to make assertions regarding Languages. No new object properties are needed.
- By isolating the capability as a disposition, we can make assertions about the disposition -- the process by which a person learned language, and date times of such processes.
- Similarly, by isolating the language of a person, an organization, or a work, we can make assertions about the specific instance of the language, such as complexity of expression, and word usage. These are beyond the scope of the Language Ontology, but are not precluded in future work.