An Ontology as a Medium of Lexical Meaning Formal Representation

The article examines the issue of lexical meaning formalization raised in computer science within the Semantic Web paradigm. An ontology is a logical theory that provides a formal account for lexical meanings of terms in accordance with an underlying conceptualization. A lexical meaning of a term is conveyed by axioms of a theory written in a formal language developed for the purpose of ontology engineering, the term being considered as a formal language vocabulary unit. The accuracy of formal definitions depends on expressiveness of the formal language implemented for ontology development. The article discusses the basic syntactic rules of a highly expressive ontology language OWL2, and their use in formal definitions construction is instantiated by means of two formal definitions extracted from the ENVO ontology and the UBERON ontology. 

Gritz M. (2017). An Ontology as a Medium of Lexical Meaning Formal Representation. Foreign Languages in Tertiary Education, ISSN 2072-7607, published by the Ryazan State University, Ryazan, Russia, vol. 2(41), pp. 60 – 71.