It is interesting to note that what Cparle wants are "is a" relationships based on common sense. For most people, ants are insects, not instances of taxon. A clarinet is a woodwind instrument, and woodwind instruments are musical instruments, not an instance of "first order metaclass".
One of the best sources of "common sense" hypernymy is probably the first sentence of a Wikipedia page. Whether in English, French, Italian, a woman is always "a female human being."
For "poodle", this would look like (following the links in the English version of Wikipedia):
- The poodle is a group of formal dog breeds
- Dog breeds are dogs that...
- The domestic dog (...) is a member of the genus Canis (canines)
- Canis is a genus of the Canidae
- The biological family Canidae (...) is a lineage of carnivorans
- Carnivora (...) is a diverse scrotiferan order
- Scrotifera is a clade of placental mammals
- Placentalia ("Placentals") is one of the three extant subdivisions of the class of animals Mammalia...
- Mammals are the vertebrates within the class Mammalia...
From my point of view, this classification looks much better than the current relationships in Wikidata's ontology.
The automatic extraction of hypernymic relationships from English texts (especially Wikipedia) has been studied for a long time and gives good results, even with simple methods based on hand-crafted rules. In the case of Wikipedia, the hypernym often has a page itself (and therefore a link to Wikidata), which could simplify the NLP extraction and the mapping with Wikidata items.
Of course, the extracted relationships will not always be "subclass of" or "instance of". But if someone proposed a new property called "Wikipedia Hypernyms" (and its symmetric property "Wikipedia Hyponyms"), I would use it more willingly and with more confidence than the current system. This would also better respect the logic of Wikidata's descriptions.
I mean, if the description of Zoroastrianism (Q9601) says this is an "Ancient Iranian religion founded by Zoroaster", one would expect the class "religion" to appear much earlier in the hierarchy of superclasses of this item. If there was this property "Wikipedia Hypernyms", we could mention it in the same page - since Wikipedia describes Zoroastrianism as "one of the world's oldest religions that remains active." And a SPARQL query looking for 'all items that have "religion" as "Wikipedia hypernyms" property' would be much much faster.
Note: sorry if this reflection is naive or if it has already been discussed/tested.
Cheers,