A generic formalism to represent linguistic corpora in RDF and OWL/DL
Christian Chiarcos · 2012
This paper describes POWLA, a generic formalism to represent linguistic corpora by means of RDF and OWL/DL.Unlike earlier approaches in this direction, POWLA is not tied to a specific selection of annotation layers, but rather, it is designed to support any kind of text-oriented annotation.POWLA inherits its generic character from the underlying data model PAULA (Dipper, 2005;Chiarcos et al., 2009) that is based on early sketches of the ISO TC37/SC4 Linguistic Annotation Framework (Ide and Romary, 2004).As opposed to existing standoff XML linearizations for such generic data models, it uses RDF as representation formalism and OWL/DL for validation.The paper discusses advantages of this approach, in particular with respect to interoperability and queriability, which are illustrated for the MASC corpus, an open multi-layer corpus of American English (Ide et al., 2008).