I Drafted an (unfinished) essay about classification on Wikidata including metamodeling here : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Item_classification

Metamodeling seems to me (and has proven to be) convenient in Wikidata. Think that there is a lot of classes, and that regrouping classes with some similarity in metaclasses can have a lot of applications, inlcuding:
* tag classes in different ontology with some ''instance of'' <class of this ontology> metaclass to help query the class by intology
* regroups class of the same kinds : classes of chemical elements can be regrouped because they all class atom with respect to their atomic numbers. This is what we call a chemical element and is consistent with the definition of chemical element in the corresponding french Wikipedia article.
* regroup classes by definition of their instances : for example the laws of a country actually defined implicitely a lot of classes. Those classes can be regrouped using metaclasses like <class defined by french law>
* ...

2014-09-25 20:07 GMT+02:00 Benjamin Good <ben.mcgee.good@gmail.com>:
Based on the CHEBI ontology perspective, alcohol is a class with subclasses like 'aromatic alcohol' which has subclasses like 'benzyl alcohols' which has subclasses like 'methylbenzyl alcohol' and so on.

These relationships seem worth capturing and subclass seems like a reasonable way to do it.  If not, would another property be better?

Check out CHEBI here:  http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/advancedSearchFT.do?searchString=alcohol&queryBean.stars=2

-Ben

  

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Alain Cuvillier <alain.cuvillier@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,

why are both the subclass of and instance of properties set for the ethanol (showcase) item?
For me ethanol is a single concrete alcohol and it is not a class. There is only one ethanol, with a single chemical formula and structure, so only the instance of property is right for this item ?


Thank you
Alain


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