A minimal constructed language (conlang) is useful for experiments and comfortable for making tools. The Toki Pona (TP) conlang is minimal both in the vocabulary (with only 14 letters and 124 lemmas) and in the (about) 10 syntax rules. The language is useful for being a used and somewhat established minimal conlang with at least hundreds of fluent speakers. This article exposes current concepts and resources for TP, and makes available Python (and Vim) scripted routines for the analysis of the language, synthesis of texts, syntax highlighting schemes, and the achievement of a preliminary TP Wordnet. Focus is on the analysis of the basic vocabulary, as corpus analyses were found. The synthesis is based on sentence templates, relates to context by keeping track of used words, and renders larger texts by using a fixed number of phonemes (e.g. for poems) and number of sentences, words and letters (e.g. for paragraphs). Syntax highlighting reflects morphosyntactic classes given in the official dictionary and different solutions are described and implemented in the well-established Vim text editor. The tentative TP Wordnet is made available in three patterns of relations between synsets and word lemmas. In summary, this text holds potentially novel conceptualizations about, and tools and results in analyzing, synthesizing and syntax highlighting the TP language.
Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments and especially in South America which exhibits a mixed culture and social predisposition. This article presents the "Social Participation Ontology" (OPS from the Brazilian name \emph{Ontologia de Participa\c{c}\~ao Social}) implemented in compliance with the Web Ontology Language standard (OWL) for fostering social participation, specially in virtual platforms. The entities and links of OPS were defined based on an extensive collaboration of specialists. It is shown that OPS is instrumental for information retrieval from the contents of the portal, both in terms of the actors (at various levels) as well as mechanisms and activities. Significantly, OPS is linked to other OWL ontologies as an upper ontology and via FOAF and BFO as higher upper ontologies, which yields sound organization and access of knowledge and data. In order to illustrate the usefulness of OPS, we present results on ontological expansion and integration with other ontologies and data. Ongoing work involves further adoption of OPS by the official Brazilian federal portal for social participation and NGO s, and further linkage to other ontologies for social participation.
Visual Analytics might be defined as data mining assisted by interactive visual interfaces. The field has been receiving prominent consideration by researchers, developers and the industry. The literature, however, is complex because it involves multiple fields of knowledge and is considerably recent. In this article we describe an initial tentative organization of the knowledge in the field as an OWL ontology and a SKOS vocabulary. This effort might be useful in many ways that include conceptual considerations and software implementations. Within the results and discussions, we expose a core and an example expansion of the conceptualization, and incorporate design issues that enhance the expressive power of the abstraction.
The semantic web has received many contributions of researchers as ontologies which, in this context, i.e. within RDF linked data, are formalized conceptualizations that might use different protocols, such as RDFS, OWL DL and OWL FULL. In this article, we describe new expressive techniques which were found necessary after elaborating dozens of OWL ontologies for the scientific academy, the State and the civil society. They consist in: 1) stating possible uses a property might have without incurring into axioms or restrictions; 2) assigning a level of priority for an element (class, property, triple); 3) correct depiction in diagrams of relations between classes, between individuals which are imperative, and between individuals which are optional; 4) a convenient association between OWL classes and SKOS concepts. We propose specific rules to accomplish these enhancements and exemplify both its use and the difficulties that arise because these techniques are currently not established as standards to the ontology designer.
Literary analysis, criticism or studies is a largely valued field with dedicated journals and researchers which remains mostly within the humanities scope. Text analytics is the computer-aided process of deriving information from texts. In this article we describe a simple and generic model for performing literary analysis using text analytics. The method relies on statistical measures of: 1) token and sentence sizes and 2) Wordnet synset features. These measures are then used in Principal Component Analysis where the texts to be analyzed are observed against Shakespeare and the Bible, regarded as reference literature. The model is validated by analyzing selected works from James Joyce (1882-1941), one of the most important writers of the 20th century. We discuss the consistency of this approach, the reasons why we did not use other techniques (e.g. part-of-speech tagging) and the ways by which the analysis model might be adapted and enhanced.