Skip to main content
11 of 12
edited tags; Post Made Community Wiki
Qmechanic
  • 213.1k
  • 48
  • 590
  • 2.3k

Lexical/ontological/semantic knowledge base for physics

(1) Are there lexical/semantic knowledge bases for physics that can be used for automated reasoning and AI (like Princeton's Wordnet and MIT's Conceptnet for common sense English usage)?

(2) If not in existence, are there physics-specific issues to keep in mind while developing such a knowledge base? For example, can it be developed by using existing semantic relationship clauses in Conceptnet? Pointers to review papers, books etc will be good too.

I understand that such a knowledge base will not be complete without the mathematics related to the lexicon. But, when browsing through Q&As here, a lot of them do not seem to involve any mathematics at all (just pure English words). In any case, it should not be impossible to add the mathematics once there is a non-mathematical lexicon/semantic network (and there seem to be a few initiatives to include math in semantic web, like OpenMath, Content-MathML, OMDoc etc)

PS: This is not some crackpot rambling. I am a phd student in high energy theoretical physics. I arrived at this question while thinking about how much of current physics can be automated through AI.

edit 1: Something related: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/physics.html

edit 2: Created a chat thread (update 2a: Apparently, the chat thread has been closed)

edit 3: Included few resources for included mathematics in semantic graph data

edit 4: Ed Shaya's astro-physics ontology, which also includes quite a bit of other areas of physics: http://www.astro.umd.edu/~eshaya/astro-onto/

GuSuku
  • 847
  • 5
  • 15