A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts

As part of a project called Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data (EMELD), we have developed an ontology of concepts that encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena. The idea was initially conceived to facilitate both the knowledge sharing of annotated linguistic data and the searching of disparate language corpora. Such an ontology, however, is needed outside of the EMELD project for enhancing performance of the Semantic Web, for developing expert systems capable of linguistic analysis, and for providing a theory-neutral backbone in the processing of scientific documents pertaining to the linguistics domain. With an eye toward acceptance by the knowledge engineering community in general, we built the linguistic ontology on top of the Standard Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO).