The Onto Family of Tools: A User Manual

Why another tool:

The new onto tool has two main purposes:

- enabling those testing the Mikrokosmos analyzer to quickly browse lexemes for certain words and the corresponding concepts in the ontology *together* in one tool

- making the Mikrokosmos ontology and Spanish lexicon accessible to lexicographers and others who want to browse them, in a single tool, especially those at remote sites (remote w.r.t. CRL)

To this end, this tool now allows ASCII access from a non-graphical terminal to the latest ontology and lexicon (see below).

What you can do with this tool:

- search for a concept in the ontology

- view a concept

- move from a concept to any concept it is connected to.

- submit a request for a change/addition to the ontology

- search for a word in the lexicon

- view the entries for a word

- jump from a lexicon entry to a concept it maps to

- submit a request for a change/addition to the lexicon

This is a low-cost tool. It was built with relatively little effort and it should not hog your machine's memory or slow it down in any significant way.

It never crashes (at least hasn't crashed so far). Even when you catch a bug (and there certainly are some), it allows you to continue gracefully.

How to use the onto tool

Getting Started:

(See below for "plain text" access.)

If you are at the console of a machine (or an xterm) in CRL, you do the following:

~mahesh/mikro/onto-tool/onto &

If you are logged into a CRL machine from a remote site, do the following

setenv DISPLAY yourmachinename:0.0

and then do the above. "yourmachinename" is something like

mace.cc.purdue.edu, for example.

You can either browse concepts in the ontology or entries in the lexicon. When you are entering a concept name or a word, if you hit a you will see all possible completions of the concept name or word. You can double click the left mouse button to select any one of them. Then by clicking on "Display?" you will see the concept or lex entry. You can also enter the complete name and then hit or click on the "Display?" button.

In the concept browser, when you hit a , you see another button that asks "More related concepts?". This button takes you to all other concepts that are related to the name you entered. This is done by matching the definition strings of those concepts. This can be interesting and funny.

Moving Around

Seeing Multiple Lex Entries:

When a word has multiple entries in the lexicon, the first entry will be displayed and you will see a "More Entries?" button at the bottom. By clicking on this you will see the next entry for the word.

You can jump from a lexicon entry to a concept by selecting a concept mentioned in the lex-map. You select it by holding down the left mouse button and highlighting the concept name. The moment you release the button you will be asked if you want to "Display?" that concept. This way you can see a lexicon entry and the corresponding concept at the same time.

You can also jump from one concept to another. There are two ways of doing this:

- highlight any concept name which is either a slot name or a filler anywhere in the concept display. This function is identical to the one described above for jumping from a lexeme to a concept.

- if there is a single filler in a slot and you want to jump to that, you can simply click the rightmost button on it. This is just a shortcut to the above method.

Submitting Onto Requests:

To send in a request for changes or additions to the ontology, select the "Onto Complain" button in the concept display window. This will display an electronic form that you can fill out. The request will be automatically mailed to the ontology group (Lori Wilson and Kavi Mahesh) and also logged appropriately. You will also receive an acknowledgement of the request for your records.

Submitting Lexicon Requests:

To send in a request for changes or additions to the lexicon, select the "Lex Complain" button in the lexicon display window and proceed as outlined above. The request will be automatically mailed to Evelyne Viegas and also logged appropriately. You will also receive an acknowledgement of the request for your records.

ASCII Access (from a non-graphical, dumb terminal):

This mode of using the tool is useful for people connecting from remote sites. It is also the *fastest* way to look up something very quickly in the ontology or the lexicon. There are four new functions:

/home/mahesh/mikro/onto-tool/olook

/home/mahesh/mikro/onto-tool/olist

/home/mahesh/mikro/onto-tool/llook

/home/mahesh/mikro/onto-tool/llist

Each takes a concept name or a word (as the case may be) as argument. olook shows the contents of the concept; olist is like the Tab search above and lists all concepts that have the given string in either their name or definition strings. llook displays the lexicon enty(ies) for the given word; llist lists all words starting with the given substring. Here are some examples:

cd /home/mahesh/mikro/onto-tool/

olook corporation

olist compu

llook introducir

llist ab

All four functions are case-insensitive.

Wish List:

I have a long list of features that I could add to this tool if I had the time. Please let me know if some feature would make the tool significantly more usable and I will try to add it. Any other feedback is always of course welcome.

Some obvious drawbacks are:

- Main display windows are not scrollable.

- No "go back to previous" button.

- Does not (yet) tolerate extra blanks in a concept name or word.

- Does not tolerate poor formatting in lexicon entries (if any).

- Syn-strucs and lex-maps in the lexicon are not properly indented (they are

just displayed as they are in the lexicon).

Hope this helps