> I was a bit surprised to see class reasoning used on diseases.

I was not aware of that, do you have links ?

> I was a bit surprised to see class reasoning used on diseases.
This depends on a particular modelling methodology.

It's not surprising as the meaning of properties is community defined (or sub community defined) so any community can use reasoning technology they want to use as which is consistent with the intended meaning of properties. As Wikidata do only stores statements anyone can use reasoning technologies on top of this that are community accepted. The drawback of this approach have been discussed on another thread some days ago : it could become tricky to understand for a simple user the path that lead to a statement addition and we have to be careful to always provide informations on which bot added inferred statements with that reasoning technology or rule from which data.

I however noticed in heated recent debates that some users on frwiki were sensible to the argument that Wikidata only does store statements. This kind of users feared that Wikidata would induce an alignment of semantics of words and items to the enwiki semantic, They believes in the linguistic hypothesis that words in a language carry some kind of language dependant meaning on their own and feared some kind of "cultural contagion" by some kind of mechanism where the specific meaning of english word would contaminate the french word. It has of course been said many time that Wikidata was not focused on words and linguistic but on definitions mainly, and that one definition equals one item, that wikidata was the sum of all knowledge, but the argument that finally seemed to be effective was the one that Wikidata do only store statements and do not einforce constraint. It seems to be effective to convince them that Wikidata is indeed POV agnostic.

2015-10-16 19:14 GMT+02:00 Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com>:
It's very pleasant to hear from someone else who thinks of Wikidata as a
knowledge base (or at least hopes that Wikidata can be considered as a
knowledge base).  Did you get any pushback on this or on your stated Wikidata
goal of structuring the sum of all human knowledge?

Did you get any pushback on your section on classification in Wikidata?  It
seems to me that some of that is rather controversial in the Wikidata
community.  I was a bit surprised to see class reasoning used on diseases.
This depends on a particular modelling methodology.

peter


On 10/12/2015 11:47 AM, Emw wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On Saturday, I facilitated a workshop at the U.S. National Archives entitled
> "An Ambitious Wikidata Tutorial" as part of WikiConference USA 2015.
>
> Slides are available at:
> http://www.slideshare.net/_Emw/an-ambitious-wikidata-tutorial
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ambitious_Wikidata_Tutorial.pdf


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