Compact Sense and Image Codes

Chronological sense-numbers can dramatically shorten SAID strings.  The time tag and all following characters get replaced by a digit unique to the namespace. This makes the SAID easier to read, pronounce, remember and type.

The Image code is similar to a sense-number, but adds one extra digit (or more if the PND so states). An image code idiomatically names a blank node for a typed but unnamed individual by extending the sense-code which preceeds it. This helps embed prototypes into a namespace, for example.

So users can recover missing SAID data, the PND must cite a public URL from which a CSV text file holding it can be downloaded.  It is basically a sense-registration log, holding all normal characters for each name space SAID, comma-separated into time tag, shape, axioms and "extension facets".

Extension Facets

Each of these is a short alphanumeric string denoting extra facets modeling the subject of its SAID.  These follow after the upper ontology axioms, and stay separated from them and one another by periods.  Extension facets of two broad types are defined so far.  If adopted by a namespace, PND must cite public specs, and give the relative order of facets (so they can be unpacked properly).

Axiom-specific facets - Many SAIDs may need these because the general axioms are so --- general. They work fine for basic discriminants (the first 10 Questions in a game of 20), but extensions adding semantic details may seem required.  A namespace that focuses on "physical substances"  for example, might add to each such SAID one of 27 million CAS Registry codes to better identify its subject.  For more depth in its "situation" SAIDs, it might instead tag on some extension facet from the Lexikos Situation ontology.

Universal facets - Very broad extra discriminants are really hard to identify, but other UOs do exist whose IDs may help.   The Lexikos Scanner, for example, uses a core-English lexikon holding several thousand most-common roots, hand-tagged (see MEANS) with the 1,000 or so category codes in Roget's Fourth International Thesaurus.  In a PSAID facet, these can greatly refine the Realm of most content terms in a paragraph .  This data works best if bundled with part-of-speech, so a character for that gets included .

In practice, such extensions could go into totally separate namespaces, so users can mix in or ignore them at application levels.  Such freedom carries high integration costs, however, and extra complexity.  A namespace author may eliminate it for his/her user community by pre-bundling such descriptors as extended SAIDs at assembly time, when the merging is relatively easy to arrange.

Namespace Web Services

The namespace in a legal PSAID must resolve to specs, but lexikon publishers may comply in several ways.  One is offering links to multiple pages, each focused on SAIDs with specific signatures of axioms.  If some of those pages are dynamic (executable), they can DO things for their related SAIDs, such as:

Translation - This downloads the axioms and extension facets of any SAID or sense code in another formal language - like WORDS, LTM or OWL.  It is just a variation on the CSV file cited earlier, but it can help end-users (or their scripts) convert to some language another tool demands. For WORDS and LTM at least, Lexikos PSIs now perform such a service on request for each of the PSIDs in CTM - our Case Frame Thesaurus. OWL Abstract Syntax is also planned

Variations - Via extra arguments, a user may request content changes on such translations.  An example is a WORDS model for some verb-like SAID, modified by extra arguments which define its mood, tense and complements in some English clause.  The return would model the contextual (argument-influenced) clause meaning, not the (baseline) verb sense.  In the biochemical realm, a similar variation might be the OWL model of some interaction SAID, modified by the contextual presence of some catalyst(s) or the atypical ionization in some participant(s).

Expansion - Both types of services could work by adjusting JSP templates.  Expansions could work similarly, but would graft in additional content present in neither the SAID signature nor the extra arguments.  Here, such input strings get used as keys into a data base (or other web services) which can return virtually any kind of data, in any format or amount the namespace authority is willing and able to provide.   For a SAID with a CAS code, for example, they might return OWL models of molecular structure or vendors who might supply it.

These examples may remind you of web services generally.  The main difference, perhaps, is that today most such services get arguments which are semantically barren - typically just numbers and strings.  Under Lexikon Standards, namespace services get SAID arguments which (to their publishers at least) denote highly robust ,  faceted descriptions built by local experts.  That can make a large difference in the behavior and output of services, even if the programming languages in which those services are written do not change.

Semantics arise in a system's vocabulary, not in its reasoning abilities.