Using openWordnet-PT to improve VIVO

Abstract

VIVO is an open source semantic web application for research discovery. The power of VIVO relies mainly on the VIVO-ISF ontology and its expressivity to represent all information about researchers and the research domain. VIVOISF makes all those types of information interconnected and browsable in the VIVO application. Nevertheless, although VIVO has good support for faceted search across disciplines, it is still not anything more than a keywordbased search engine. That is; it is still not using the power of semantics for information retrieving. WordNet [5] is an extremely valuable resource for research in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing in general. WordNet has been used for a number of different purposes in information systems, including word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, automatic text classification, automatic text summarization, and dozens of other knowledge intensive projects. WordNets model the semantic relationships between words and they are crucial in all those applications because computational systems are not aware of the fact that salario (salary) and contra-cheque (paycheck) both refer to salary, or that beneficio (benefit) is also related to these words as a common more general hypernym. Wordnets have been distributed in a wide range of different incompatible data formats. An increasingly popular way of addressing the issue of interoperability is to rely on Linked Data and Semantic Web standards such as RDF [2] and OWL [7], which have led to the emergence of a number of Linked Data projects for lexical resources [3, 1]. OpenWordnet-PT 1 is a lexical-semantic resource describing (Brazilian) Portuguese words and their relationships. It is modelled after and fully interoperable with the original Princeton WordNet for English [5], relying