Guidelines for Naming Concepts

1. Use the English word whose word sense maps to the concept when possible.

2. Use only alphabetic characters and the hyphen sign; avoid using other characters such as the underscore or other control characters.

3. If you must include arguments (such as default themes, for instance) in EVENT names, use the argument name after the EVENT name (and a hyphen). Do not put the argument first and then the EVENT name. For example, to distinguish between preserving foods and preserving antique paintings, name the concepts preserve-food and preserve-painting (as opposed to food-preserve and painting-preserve).

4. Do not use plurals in concept names. For example, we will call it preserve-painting and not preserve-paintings.

5. When there is a large discrepancy in frequencies between different word senses of a word, name the most frequent one with just the word and add hyphens to others. For example, the concept bank will stand for the ``money holding place'' sense of bank; bank-river and bank-device will stand for a river bank and a bank of generators or disk drives.

6. Keep in mind that no two frames can have the same name in the ontology. Many Properties and OBJECTs tend to suggest the same name. We must use different names for Properties. For example, if employee is both an OBJECT and a Property, name the OBJECT employee and the Property employed-by (and its Inverse employer-of).

7. If necessary, append a parent's name (or a part of a parent's name) to a word to get a name for a child concept.

8. Else, append a typical child's name to a word to get a name for a parent.

9. Do not append -N or -V, etc. to concept names since they seem like language specific items.

10. For Property names, append typical prepositions to distinguish them from OBJECTs as well as to indicate the direction of the Property (and hence distinguish it from its Inverse Property).

11. For example, consider the Relations between an employee and an employer. From the domain of employees to the relation-range of employers, we have as possible Property names employer-of, employed-by, employee-of, and employs. We can perhaps use the following guidelines:
    • Use hyphenated names for Properties in both directions or use simple names in both directions. Do not mix them up. For example, this rules out employs since that is the odd one out.

    • If possible, do not use the same preposition in both a Property and its Inverse. For example, of the three above, this rules out using both employee-of and employer-of.

    • In this example, since we must use employed-by and one of the other two, we select employed-by and employer-of (i.e., employee is employed-by employer and employer is employer-of employee).

12. Whenever possible, use ``scientific'' rather than lay terms.

13. Try to be consistent in the names of ontological concepts while going up or down a subtree. For example, EVENT has Subclasses MENTAL-EVENT, PHYSICAL-EVENT, and SOCIAL-EVENT.

14. Whenever possible, try to include an indication of some distinguishing characteristic of the concept in its name. It is especially useful to include a characteristic that distinguishes the concept from its immediate siblings. For example, VOLUNTARY-VISUAL-EVENT and INVOLUNTARY-VISUAL-EVENT indicate EVENTs that involve vision, with voluntary or involuntary participation (perhaps corresponding to the English verbs `look' and `see').

15. English words must be used consistently in only one sense throughout the ontology. For example, we should not have a grocery-store as well as a store-medicine (the former an OBJECT and the latter an EVENT). Perhaps we should name them grocery-store and preserve-medicine (but then we must rule out peach-preserve for a jam made of peaches).

16. Consistency across concepts is more important to us than conformance with a dictionary. Since there is no single word in English for "forprofit" we have no choice but to hyphenate both for-profit and non-profit.

17. Do not use names longer than three words. The longest name allowed shall be three words with two hyphens in between. If the name gets longer as we go down a particular subtree in the hierarchy, drop one of the most obvious words in a longer name to shorten it.
18. Avoid compound nouns in concept names unless the Relations between the meanings of the nouns are unambiguous and obvious. For example, do not use TIME-UNIT; use UNIT-OF-TIME instead.
19. Violate naming order if the concept refers to a commonly used phrase. For example, use DINING-TABLE, not TABLE-DINING.