Abstract.
The paper aims at presenting theWordnet Management System, a system that acts as the interconnection and communication liaison between a user and a number of interlinked wordnets. Semantic information is being accessed through a distributed network of servers, forming a large-scale multilingual semantic network. The standalone and monolithic nature of most current wordnet tools limit to a great extent the usage of the developed wordnets. In particular, these tools do not support adequately the needs of collaborative and distributed working groups in heterogenous environments and cannot be easily integrated into the everyday computing environment of users. Lack of support- ing collaborative working groups hinders developing and interconnecting the individual wordnets while lack of integration support makes awareness of wordnet at the application level difficult and error prone. Yet, the interconnection of wordnets as well as the utilization of wordnets in various applications are the explicit goals of the WordNet project. In this paper, the design and development of the Wordnet Management System (WMS), a large scale, distributed, service-oriented Wordnet Management System is presented. WMS attempts to overcome the limitations of standalone Wordnet tools. It enables collaborative authoring and interconnection of individual cross-lingual wordnets, and provides developers with the means to facilitate the integration of wordnet resources and services into third-party applications. WMS defines a protocol for loosely coupling individual wordnets, thus exhibiting openness. Individual wordnets may be handled by the WMS with small cost. This distributed nature of the WMS paves also the ground to witness – with respect to multilinguality – network effects in wordnets: a situation in which the utility of an individual Wordnet depends on the number of other wordnets incorporated into the WMS.