Troponym Structures?
A premise: Most ontologies are built from the relationships among
concepts. These are collections mainly of nouns, sometimes of noun
phrases. People express meaning by voicing concepts. That is, people
express their intentions through language, using language to achieve
their goals. People reach their goals by transforming concepts into
other concepts, via argument, persuasion, further understanding of the
world, or better organization of their knowledge. Expressing intention,
then, is exercising the ability to transform concepts. Similarly,
receipents of a message interpret the concepts both by their own
understanding of the concepts conveyed, but also the manner in which it
was conveyed, the way the sender transformed the concepts.
A question: Why is it that ontology construction seems to be mostly
about nouns, and not about verbs? Are there no large ontologies
constructed only of language verbs? Many ontologies are built around
inheritance structures, hyponymns. Are there corresponding troponymic
ontologies for the words that transform concepts?
-- Jeff Schiffel