BabelNet 1.1, A very large multilingual ontology.
From the homepage:
A very large multilingual ontology with 5.5 millions of concepts • A wide-coverage “encyclopedic dictionary” • Obtained from the automatic integration of WordNet and Wikipedia • Enriched with automatic translations of its concepts • Connected to the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud!
From: BabelNet: The automatic construction, evaluation and application of a wide-coverage multilingual semantic network by Roberto Navigli and Simone Paolo Ponzetto.
In this paper, we take a major step towards realizing the vision of a wide-coverage multilingual knowledge resource. We present a novel 3 integration and enrichment methodology that produces a very large multilingual semantic network: BabelNet. This resource is created by linking the largest multilingual Web encyclopedia – i.e., Wikipedia – to the most popular computational lexicon – i.e., WordNet. The integration is performed via an automatic mapping and by filling in lexical gaps in resource-poor languages with the aid of Machine Translation. The result is an “encyclopedic dictionary” that provides concepts and named entities lexicalized in many languages and connected with large amounts of semantic relations.
A stunning achievement that will be very useful for any number of projects.
However, to put the 5.5 million concepts in perspective, consider that the Saturn V command module alone had more than 2 million parts.
All of which had names, other designations and relationships to other parts.
Even starting with 5.5 million concepts, there is no shortage of subjects to be identified.
Properties you use to identify these concepts and other subjects help capture your meaning in a topic map.