FrameNet Ontology

OWL Ontology generated from the XML encoding of FrameNet 1.1. The sources have been the XML file for the frames definitions (frames.xml) and the file for the frames relations (frRelation.xml).

For frames.xml, the XSLT frames2owl.xsl generates:

• An OWL Class for each frame.
• An OWL ObjectProperty for each slot name.
• An OWL someValuesFrom restriction for each frame slot. Each restriction is related to the corresponding OWL Class as a necessary and suficient condition. The values are defined as OWL Thing unless a semtype is defined for it. In this case the semtype is used as the values restriction class.

For frRelations.xml, the XSLT frRelation2owl.xsl generates:

• SubClassOf relations for the inheritance relations between frames for the corresponding OWL classes.
• SubPropertyOf relations for the superSlot/subSlot relations defined in the context of a frames inheritance relation.

The results of these XSLT transformations are joined manually afterwards in order to compose the whole FrameNet OWL ontology.

Results

The result of the previous transformations is the FrameNet 1.1 OWL Ontology.
From the OWL ontology, some views have been generated on the hierarchies defined by the different kinds of frame relations. Note that just the frames that are related by the considered relation are shown:

• Inheritance hierarchy: GIF, SVG
• Subframe hierarchy: GIF, SVG
• Use hierarchy: GIF, SVG

As it has been previously shown, frames slots are mapped to necessary and suficient OWL restrictions. This has been done in order to enable further experiments with the FrameNet Ontology. An OWL reasoner has been used in order to infer the classification of frames implied by these necessary and suficient restrictions. We have obtained a more dense classification of the frames based on their shared structure, i.e. the slots they have and the relations between these slots. It is the FrameNet 1.1 Inferred OWL Ontology.

The inferred version contains quite extrange relations between frames, e.g. the "Travel" frame appears as a subClassOf "Medical_instruments". This is inferred because "Medical_instruments" just contains the "instrument" and "manner" slots, which are translated to two N&S restrictions and shared by a lot of frames that consequently are classified as equivalent or subclasses of it. A view of the inferred equivalence relations and subClassOf hierarchy has been generated:

• Equivalence/Inheritance hierarchy: PNG, SVG

Future Work

Use FrameNet 1.2 as the source for the transformations in order to generate an updated version. Actually, version 1.2 already incorporates an OWL version of the frame net. However, it is a quite plain ontology as it introduces distinct classes and object properties for the same source frames and slots depending on the context they appear on. For instance, slots are differentiated depending on the frame they take part and the superFrame/subFrame relations are not captured in the OWL version.