If one is interested in a functional “category” system, it would be very helpful to have a good logic-based ontology as the backbone.

I haven’t looked recently, but when I inquired about the ontology used by DBpedia a year ago, I was referred to “dbpedia-ontology.owl”, an ontology in the format of the “semantic web” ontology format OWL.  The OWL format is excellent for simple purposes, but the dbpedia-ontology.owl (at that time) was not well-structured (being very polite).  I did inquire as to who was maintaining the ontology, and had a hard time figuring out how to help bring it up to professional standards.  But it was like punching jello, nothing to grasp onto. I gave up, having other useful things to do with my time.

Perhaps it is time now, with more experience in hand, to rethink the category system starting with basics.   This is not as hard as it sounds.  It may require some changes where there is ambiguity or logical inconsistency, but mostly it only necessary to link the Wikipedia categories to an  ontology based on a well-structured and logically sound foundation ontology (also referred to as an “upper ontology”), that supplies the basic categories and relations.  Such an ontology can provide the basic concepts, whose labels can be translated into any terminology that any local user wants to use.  There are several well-structured foundation ontologies, based on over twenty years of research, but the one I suggest is the one I am most familiar with (which I created over the past seven years), called COSMO.  The files at http://micra.com/COSMO will provide the ontology itself (“COSMO.owl”, in OWL) and papers describing the basic principles.    COSMO is structured to be a “primitives-based foundation ontology”, containing all of the “semantic primitives” needed to describe anything one wants to talk about.   All other categories are structured as logical combinations of the  basic elements.  Its inventory of primitives is probably incomplete, but is able to describe everything I have been concerned with for years (7000 categories and 800 relations thus far) can always be supplemented as required for new fields.  With an OWL ontology, queries can be executed by any of several logic-based utilities.  Making the query system easy for those who prefer not to build SPARQL queries (including myself) would require some programming, but that is a miniscule effort compared to what has already been put into the DBPedia database.  Tools such as “Protégé” make it easy to work with an OWL ontology, and there is a web site where an OWL ontology can be developed collaboratively.

I will be willing to put some effort into this and assist anyone who wants to used the COSMO ontology for this project.   If those who are in charge of maintaining the ontology (is anyone?) would like to discuss this at greater length, send me an email or telephone me.  All those who are interested in this topic may also feel free to contact me, or to discuss this thread on the list.   I suggest the thread title “Foundation Ontology”.

Pat