Hi David,

How does your treatise relate to the fact that https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q153 has statements that entail the following? [1]

ethanol

    instance of chemical compound

    subclass of chemical compound

How would it resolve that specific problem?

Such statements make Wikidata incompatible with ChEBI and other major ontologies, like Gene Ontology and Disease Ontology, which use instance of (i.e. rdf:type, P31) and subclass of (i.e. rdfs:subClassOf, P279, is_a) as recommended in the Relation Ontology (RO) [2] and the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).

For Wikidata to be interoperable with other major ontologies in the Semantic Web, we cannot "scrap everything and start again from the beginning".  We must stand on the shoulders of giants.  Doing away with "entity" [3] as a the top of the subclass of hierarchy and introducing a raft of idiosyncratic ontological constructs like "identifiables", "cognizables", "negentropy" and "system survival-oriented direction" to Wikidata is probably not the way to go.

Regarding your concerns about the ability of existing approaches to represent emergent properties and natural language, I recommend perusing [4], an influential paper that informs DOLCE and BFO -- particularly the section on "The Role of Identity Criteria".  I also highly recommend lectures 3 and 1 in http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/IntroOntology_Course.html for gaining a perspective on how BFO maintainers think about things like distinguishing objects and representations, and that upper ontology's philosophical roots.  Given your interest in phenomenology and Husserl, you may also be interested in what BFO maintainers have written on those subjects in e.g. [5] with regard to ontology.

Best,
Eric

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q153 currently states "ethanol subclass of alcohol", but given "alcohol subclass of organic compound" and "organic compound subclass of chemical compound", it is entailed that "ethanol subclass of chemical compound".
[2] Barry Smith et al. (2005).  Relations in Biomedical Ontologies.  http://genomebiology.com/2005/6/5/r46
[3] "Entity" item on Wikidata.  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120.  Mapped to owl:Thing.
[4] Nicola Guarino (1998). Some Ontological Principles for Designing Upper Level Lexical Resources.  http://arxiv.org/pdf/cmp-lg/9809002v1
[5] Barry Smith (1989).  Husserl: Logic and Formal Ontology.  http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/lfo.html

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