Polynym

The Polynym project is an interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition effort to collect superordinate theoretical constructs, such as Freud’s three aspects of the human psyche (Id, Ego, Superego). I use the term polynym (literally, ‘many-word’) to mean an array of subordinate elements that defines a superordinate axiom. Collecting diverse polynyms in a single location will stimulate interdisciplinary thought, collaboration and debate.

Like a thesaurus, synonym sets in a lexical database are highly aligned in meaning. In the context of a superordinate construct, synonym sets may be more abstract. Creating super/subordinate synonym sets is a unique way to define and compare axioms. Several linguistic and conceptual domain-based semantic networks have been developed, such as Cyc, WordNet and ConceptNet. Similar networks of theoretical superordinate constructs have not yet been assembled. We introduce the current ontology to assemble a potentially useful corpus of knowledge.

Project page: http://web.media.mit.edu/~scottyv/poly/