Am 07.05.2013 14:01, schrieb emw:
"Yes, there is and should be more than one "ontology", and that is already the case with categories, which are so flexible they can loop around and become their own grandfather."
Can someone give an example of where it would be useful to have a cycle in an ontology?
Navigation! How else are you going to find back where you came from ;) Wikipieda categories were invented originally for navigation, right? Cycles are not soo bad, then... Now we live in a new era. -- Sebastian
To my knowledge cycles are considered a problem in categorization, and would be a problem in a large-scaled ontology-based classification system as well. My impression has been that Wikidata's ontology would be a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with a single root at entity http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120 (thing).
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave@culture-libre.org mailto:psychoslave@culture-libre.org> wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 18:13, Jane Darnell a écrit : Yes, there is and should be more than one "ontology", and that is already the case with categories, which are so flexible they can loop around and become their own grandfather. To my mind, categories indeed feet better how we think. I'm not sure "grandfather" is a canonical term in such a graph, I think it's simply a cycle[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_%28graph_theory%29 Dbpedia complaints should be discussed on that list, I am not a dbpedia user, though I think it's a useful project to have around. Sorry I didn't want to make off topic messages, nor sound complaining. I just wanted to give my feedback, hopefuly a constructive one, on a message posted on this list. I transfered my message to dbpedia mailing list. Sent from my iPad On May 6, 2013, at 12:00 PM, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt <jc@sahnwaldt.de <mailto:jc@sahnwaldt.de>> wrote: Hi Mathieu, I think the DBpedia mailing list is a better place for discussing the DBpedia ontology: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion Drop us a message if you have questions or concerns. I'm sure someone will answer your questions. I am not an ontology expert, so I'll just leave it at that. JC On 6 May 2013 11:01, Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave@culture-libre.org <mailto:psychoslave@culture-libre.org>> wrote: Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave@culture-libre.org <mailto:psychoslave@culture-libre.org>> wrote: Le dimanche 05 mai 2013 à 16:28 +0200, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a The ontology is maintained by a community that everyone can join at http://mappings.dbpedia.org/ . An overview of the current class hierarchy is here: http://mappings.dbpedia.org/server/ontology/classes/ . You're more than welcome to help! I think talk pages are not used enough on the mappings wiki, so if you have ideas, misgivings or questions about the DBpedia ontology, the place to go is probably the mailing list: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion Do you maintain several "ontologies" in parallel? Otherwise, how do you plane to avoid a "cultural bias", and how do you think it may impact the other projects? I mean, if you try to establish "one semantic hierarchy to rule them all", couldn't it arise cultural diversity concerns? We maintain only one version of the ontology. We have a pretty diverse community, so I hope the editors will take care of that. So far, the ontology does have a Western bias though, more or less like the English Wikipedia or the current list of Wikidata properties. JC I can't see how your community could take care of it when they have no choice but not contribute at all or contribute to one ontology whose structure already defined main axes. To my mind, it's a structural bias, you can't go out of it without going out of the structure. As far as I understand, the current "ontology"[1] you are using is a tree with a central root, and not a DAG or any other graph. In my humble opinion, if you need a central element/leaf, it should be precisely "ontology"/representation, under which one may build several world representation networks, and even more relations between this networks which would represent how one may links concepts of different cultures. To my mind the problem is much more important than with a local Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects). Because each project can expose subjects through the collective representation of this local community. But with wikidata central role, isn't there a risk of "short-circuit" this local expressions? Also, what is your metric to measure a community diversity? I don't want to be pessimist, nor to look like I blame the current wikidata community, but it doesn't seems evident to me that it currently represent human diversity. I think that there are probably a lot of economical/social/educational/etc barriers that may seems like nothing to anyone already involved in the wikidata community, but which are gigantic for those non-part-of-the-community people. Now to give my own opinion of the representation/ontology you are building, I would say that it's based on exactly the opposite premisses I would use. Wikidata Q1 is universe, then you have earth, life, death and human, and it seems to me that the ontology you are building have the same anthropocentrist bias of the universe. To my mind, should I peak a central concept to begin with, I would not take universe, but perception, because perceptions are what is given to you before you even have a concept for it. Even within solipsism you can't deny perceptions (at least as long as the solipcist pretend to exist, but if she doesn't, who care about the opinion of a non-existing person :P). Well I wouldn't want to flood this list with epistemological concerns, but it just to say that even for a someone like me that you may probably categorise as western-minded, this "ontology" looks like the opposite of my personal opinion on the matter. I don't say that I am right and the rest of the community is wrong. I say that I doubt that you can build an ontology which would fit every cultural represantions into a tree of concepts. But maybe it's not your goal in the first place, so you may explain me what is your goal then. [1] I use quotes because it's seems to me that what most IT people call an ontology, is what I would call a representation. _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l -- Association Culture-Libre http://www.culture-libre.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l