There are five top level categories in the basic ontology we have developed: Coperorg, Asset, Debt, Good, and Service. The first two of these have a rich internal structure of subcategories. Good has one subcategory. The data did not require subcategories for the other two. In what follows, we describe each of the categories and subcategories and give examples of words that fall into these categories.
Coperorg: A top-level category. A ``coperorg'' is an ad hoc superclass that covers a classes of entities whose functions and actions often coincide. The term comes from ``Country-Person-Organization''. A Coperorg may be thought of as a ``legal person''. The subclasses of Coperorg include people, countries, corporations, governments, and various other types of organizations. Figure 1 shows the structure of the category Coperorg.
Many of the examples of words that are classified as coperorgs are nominalizations of verbs whose case frames we developed. For example, one pattern for ``sell'' is
Coperorg sells {Good Service} to Coperorg for Money.
The word ``seller'' refers to the agent of the selling, and thus would be classified as a Coperorg. A ``seller'' can be any of the various subclasses, so defining ``seller'' as a Coperorg and not disjunctively as a person, corporation, country, and so on, is a succinct way of allowing ``seller'' function as a member of any of the sublcasses of Coperorg.
The following is a list of some of the words that the data indicated should be classified as Coperorgs. Plurals of these words would also be so classified.
Examples: client, commission, competitor, customer, creditor, holder, investor, member, parent, partner, producer, purchaser, receiver, shareholder, side, team.
Person: A subclass of Coperorg. This should be fairly self-evident. In addition to words that refer necessarily to people some words such as ``traders'' were classified as belonging to the Person category because the agents of the verb ``trade'' were primarily people.
Proper names of persons and pronouns such as ``I'', ``he'', ``we'', and ``everyone'' are classed as Persons. Additional examples of the class are as follows: acquirer, announcer, bidder, chief, citizen, defendant, elderly, family, foreigner, grower, heir, human, individual, leader, man, manager, management, official, president, regulator, staff, taxpayer, victim, voter, woman, worker.
There was some debate as to whether to classify words such as ``management'' or ``familiy'' as Persons or as some other larger organization of people. What decided these cases was the level of internal organization. A group of workers, for instance, is a group of individuals with little organization, so ``worker'' and ``workers'' are in the class Person. A union, on the other hand, has a fairly high degree of internal organization, so ``union'' is classed as Organization.
Country: A subclass of Coperorg. This is a fairly well defined category. There was some debate over whether to include states and provinces in the category of Country or as a seperate subclass.
Proper names of countries are in this category. Other examples: issuer, nation, republic, state.
Org: A subclass of Coperorg. This class contains entities that are groups of people bound by some well-defined internal organization. This includes organizations like unions, the NRA, churches, and colleges. It contains two important sublclasses, companies and governmental organization. An actor nominalization of a verb whose argument can be either a company or a governmental organization is classified as an Org rather than seperately under Company and Govt.
Examples: association, board, college, committee, church, federation, group, institute, institution, issuer, organization, party, union, university.
Company: A subclass of Org. This category includes any proper name referring to a company, actor nominalizations of verbs where a company is usually what is meant, and words like ``giant'', when used as a noun, that typically refer to companies.
Examples: acquirer, affiliate, airline, bank, bidder, bottler, business, company, concern, corporation, dealer, firm, franchise, grower, joint-venture, partnership, service, station, store, trust, utility, venture.
Rating-Co: A subclass of Company. This category is used for only one verb, ``to rate'', and describes three companies, Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch's, that rate the credit-worthiness of companies and securities.
Govt: A subclass of Org. This category includes any governing body of a country, any lower organizations such as ``ministry'' or ``department'' that refer to a part of the government, and words like ``district'' and ``municipality'' that could be used to refer to a governmental organization. Also included are such groups as the United Nations, which does not govern any specific country.
Examples: administration, agency, authority, court, department, district, government, military, ministry, municipality, operation, state.
Legislative-Body: A subclass of Govt. This category includes special parts of governments that deal with the creation of laws. It is useful as a seperate category for such verbs as ``legislate''.
Examples: congress, council, diet, house, legislature, parliament, senate.
Part-of-Co: A subclass of Coperorg. This category includes words like ``division'' or ``subsidiary'' that refer to part of a corporation. This is a seperate category from Company because there are attributes of a company, such as having a board of directors and a CEO, that apply to companies but not to their constituent parts.
Examples: affiliate, arm, branch, department, division, franchise, maker, operation, subsidiary, unit.
Some words, such as "franchise", can refer to either a Company or a Part-of-Co.
Asset: A top-level category. Words in this category refer to items that are owned and traded in the market place and typically not consumed. This differentiates assets from goods and services whose defining characteristic is that they are consumed. The structure of the category is shown in Figure 2.
Examples: asset, barge, capital, equity, horse, holding, investment, jet, money, pipeline, porfolio, reserve, seat, ship, stake, technology.
Horses in this case are the kind that are bred for racing and not the kind used for meat. The latter are consumption, which would make them a good.
The categories Company and Part-of-Co are subclasses of the category Asset. In addition to being volitional players in the domain, companies and their consituent parts can also be owned, brought, sold, borrowed against, and so on. In other words, they are also Assets.
Real-Estate: A subclass of Asset. This includes words referring to land or any structures on that land.
Examples: ballpark, building, home, house, housing, lot, port, property, real estate.
Facility: A subclass of Real-Estate. This category contains words that refer to the place where some good or service is produced.
Examples: building, facility, factory, plant.
Farm: A subclass of Facility. This category contains words that refer to the place where a commoditity (a subclass of Good) is produced.
Examples: acre, farm, field, land, plot, ranch.
Money: A subclass of Asset. This category contains words like ``currency'' and ``cash'' which are synonymous with money, and words like ``reward'' and ``payment'' which don't necessarily mean money, but frequently do. Expressions of specific dollar (or yen, or pound) amounts are also in this class.
Examples: aid, cash, currency, fee, money, payment, price, proceeds, receipts, reward, tender.
Financial-Instrument: A subclass of Asset. In this category are assets (or their proxies) that are traded within organized financial markets. Anything traded on stock or commodity exchanges would be counted in this category. Also words like ``offering'', ``future'', or ``junk'' (as in ``junk bond'') are included as they refer to some type of financial instrument.
Examples: bill, bond, cd, certificate, certificate of deposit, contract, currency, debenture, dollar, fund, future, issue, junk, mortgage, note, offering, option, pound, security, share, stock.
Debt: A top-level category. In literal accounting terms debt is the exact opposite of an asset. In fact, someone's debt is necessarily someone else's asset. Debt and Asset are ofted used together with the same verbs, and liability can change hands as easily as ownership. Still, debt is not an asset, thus we felt it necessary to have debt as a seperate category.
Examples: debt, commitment, loan, mortgage, obligation.
G&S: A top-level category. A good or a service, like an asset, is traded in the marketplace. What differentiates the two, however, is that the purpose of a good or a service is to be consumed. The class G&S subsumes the classes Good and Service. There are cases where it is difficult to decide whether something is a good or a service; these entities are assigned to the class G&S. The structure of the category is shown in Figure 3.
Good: A subclass of G&S. The range of examples for goods is very broad. Almost any physical product sold by a company is categorized as a good.
Examples of Good: alcohol, auto, car, chip, commercial, computer, device, drug, durables, electricity, food, ginseng, hormone, jewelry, machine, milk, movie, product, record, rifle, shovel, subscription, spray, textile, truck, watch, weapon, widget.
Service: A subclass of G&STop-level categories. The range of examples for services is even broader than for goods. Any action performed by one entity for another could be categorized as a service.
Examples of Service: entertainment, heathcare, product, show.
Commodity: A subclass of Good. Commodities are collections of items or portions of substances where the differences among the items or portions are not significant. For example, one bushel of corn is pretty much like any other bushel of corn. They are typically the products of extractive industries.
Examples: cereal, copper, corn, cotton, cottonseed, crop, gold, grain, hog, metal, milk, oil, rice, silver, sugar, timber, vegetable, wine.
Words such as ``hog'' generally occur either in the plural or in prenominal position, as in ``hog futures''.