I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
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 havent 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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
I think you need to start redesigns by considering scenarios with specific examples. What are the tasks that I want to do that I can't currently do? What are the tasks that I do so much that they should be easier? Can you provide an example of some DBpedia queries that are awkward due to the current ontology and would be improved by COSMO? Things like that typically change gradually on wiki-projects as opposed to starting over. Here are the beginnings of a visual query interface for Wikidata: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/wdq/ Also, the English Wikipedia currently has about a million categories. Some of them are used for infrastructure purposes, but the vast majority of them are content categories. The original issue was that not all categories that contain people have subcategories for males and females. With Wikidata we will be able to say, "The vast majority of these articles have a statement describing their sex, so we can place a filter for that property on this category page." Then we can find a balance between the organic nature of the category system without having to worry about categories like "American male Democratic politicians". We could just have a politicians category, and the system would be smart enough to know that it should put gender, nationality, and party filters on that page. Then eventually we might have enough structured data to eliminate the category system. That is how I imagine the progression at least.
From: pat@micra.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 19:25:25 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale
Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM
To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date:
Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200
From: jane023@gmail.com
To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories
began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by
severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category
user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of
a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little
synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being
able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata
sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current
category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some
category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split
them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent
media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this
is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia
readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction
to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the
potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in
Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the
recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers"
would not
have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions
instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it
would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category
system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it
has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the
various
infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion
of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Wikidata-l mailing list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
I'd really like to see this evolve into a Wikiproject, if one doesn't already exists. What's the next step? I started a sister conversation about this on the GLAM-US mailing list, here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/glam-us/2013-May/000157.html. There was a suggestion about starting a page on meta, and then inviting stakeholders to come join a discussion. I'm sure there have been efforts already in this direction, it would be nice to have a place to consolidate information.
Chris
On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 5:15 AM, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com wrote:
I think you need to start redesigns by considering scenarios with specific examples. What are the tasks that I want to do that I can't currently do? What are the tasks that I do so much that they should be easier? Can you provide an example of some DBpedia queries that are awkward due to the current ontology and would be improved by COSMO? Things like that typically change gradually on wiki-projects as opposed to starting over. Here are the beginnings of a visual query interface for Wikidata: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/wdq/ Also, the English Wikipedia currently has about a million categories. Some of them are used for infrastructure purposes, but the vast majority of them are content categories. The original issue was that not all categories that contain people have subcategories for males and females. With Wikidata we will be able to say, "The vast majority of these articles have a statement describing their sex, so we can place a filter for that property on this category page." Then we can find a balance between the organic nature of the category system without having to worry about categories like "American male Democratic politicians". We could just have a politicians category, and the system would be smart enough to know that it should put gender, nationality, and party filters on that page. Then eventually we might have enough structured data to eliminate the category system. That is how I imagine the progression at least.
From: pat@micra.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 19:25:25 -0400
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
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Hi Pat,
I've been involved with DBpedia for several years, so these are interesting thoughts.
On 5 May 2013 01:25, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
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).
Do you mean just the file dbpedia-ontology.owl or the DBpedia ontology in general? We still use OWL as our main format for publishing the ontology. The file is generated automatically. Maybe the generation process could be improved.
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.
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
Thanks!
Christopher
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
As far as checking the import progress of Wikidata, the category American women writers has 1479 articles. 651 of them currently have a main type (GND), 328 have a sex, 162 have an occupation, 111 have a country of citizenship, 49 have a sexual orientation, 39 have a place of birth, etc.
From: jc@sahnwaldt.de Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 16:28:14 +0200 To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Hi Pat,
I've been involved with DBpedia for several years, so these are interesting thoughts.
On 5 May 2013 01:25, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
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).
Do you mean just the file dbpedia-ontology.owl or the DBpedia ontology in general? We still use OWL as our main format for publishing the ontology. The file is generated automatically. Maybe the generation process could be improved.
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.
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
Thanks!
Christopher
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Doug from WikiSource started a page over at meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beyond_categories
I'll be trying to fill in some of my understanding of the problem and the scope of a possible solution. I recognize there's been a lot of prior art on this issue, and a lot of existing overlapping tools and infrastructure, and I'm pretty new around here, and apt to be inaccurate and naive. So I do hope others with more experience will come and help sort it out.
Chris
On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com wrote:
As far as checking the import progress of Wikidata, the category American women writers has 1479 articles. 651 of them currently have a main type (GND), 328 have a sex, 162 have an occupation, 111 have a country of citizenship, 49 have a sexual orientation, 39 have a place of birth, etc.
From: jc@sahnwaldt.de Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 16:28:14 +0200
To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Hi Pat,
I've been involved with DBpedia for several years, so these are interesting thoughts.
On 5 May 2013 01:25, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
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).
Do you mean just the file dbpedia-ontology.owl or the DBpedia ontology in general? We still use OWL as our main format for publishing the ontology. The file is generated automatically. Maybe the generation process could be improved.
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.
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
Thanks!
Christopher
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion of this particular issue.
-- Chris
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
There's a related essay on Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Next_generation_categories .
The Wikidata properties instance ofhttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P31(formerly "is a") and subclass of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P279 are likely relevant to folks interested in ontology building on Wikidata. They're based on rdfs:type http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_type and rdfs:subClassOfhttp://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_subclassoffrom W3C recommendations, and allow for building a rooted DAG that places concepts into a hierarchy of knowledge. They also allow for a degree of type-token distinction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type%E2%80%93token_distinctionwhen classifying subjects, though how that applies to certain knowledge domains hasn't been fully sussed out.
On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com wrote:
Doug from WikiSource started a page over at meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beyond_categories
I'll be trying to fill in some of my understanding of the problem and the scope of a possible solution. I recognize there's been a lot of prior art on this issue, and a lot of existing overlapping tools and infrastructure, and I'm pretty new around here, and apt to be inaccurate and naive. So I do hope others with more experience will come and help sort it out.
Chris
On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com wrote:
As far as checking the import progress of Wikidata, the category American women writers has 1479 articles. 651 of them currently have a main type (GND), 328 have a sex, 162 have an occupation, 111 have a country of citizenship, 49 have a sexual orientation, 39 have a place of birth, etc.
From: jc@sahnwaldt.de Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 16:28:14 +0200
To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Hi Pat,
I've been involved with DBpedia for several years, so these are interesting thoughts.
On 5 May 2013 01:25, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
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).
Do you mean just the file dbpedia-ontology.owl or the DBpedia ontology in general? We still use OWL as our main format for publishing the ontology. The file is generated automatically. Maybe the generation process could be improved.
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.
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
Thanks!
Christopher
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and
Wikidata
will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface
that
causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata
and
then including it in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category
system.
You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football league popularity split by language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing
I'm currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour
of
a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and
being
able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it,
some
category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great
introduction
to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as
it
has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any
discussion
of this particular issue.
-- Chris
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I just wanted to throw in a few more thoughts after looking at the Commons and Meta pages about improving categories. Wikidata does have items that correspond to category pages. These store translations and we can use them to add any extra relations between categories that we need. http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7217075 I agree that Semantic MediaWiki seems most useful for smaller, specialized wikis with fewer anonymous users that don't have the need for synchronized updates across many pages that can't be handled by just templates. If I was going to play around with adding filters to categories I would want it to be something like a category filter template that can be added to category pages to show a dropdown box (with typing support) for a given property. I would automatically generate the initial set of filtered properties for a category by taking all of the properties that the items in the category don't have all the same value for and don't have all different values for (obviously we wouldn't want to filter a category of people by their main type because they are all people and we wouldn't want to filter by their parents because most all of them have different parents and they all have different LCCN and VIAF IDs). Then I would take the 5 most popular of those properties among the items to use as filters. Then we could add or remove them manually from there and we could start merging categories that are handled by the filters.
Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 14:45:05 -0400 From: emw.wiki@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
There's a related essay on Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Next_generation_categories.
The Wikidata properties instance of (formerly "is a") and subclass of are likely relevant to folks interested in ontology building on Wikidata. They're based on rdfs:type and rdfs:subClassOf from W3C recommendations, and allow for building a rooted DAG that places concepts into a hierarchy of knowledge. They also allow for a degree of type-token distinction when classifying subjects, though how that applies to certain knowledge domains hasn't been fully sussed out.
On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com wrote:
Doug from WikiSource started a page over at meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beyond_categories
I'll be trying to fill in some of my understanding of the problem and
the scope of a possible solution. I recognize there's been a lot of
prior art on this issue, and a lot of existing overlapping tools and
infrastructure, and I'm pretty new around here, and apt to be
inaccurate and naive. So I do hope others with more experience will
come and help sort it out.
Chris
On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com wrote:
As far as checking the import progress of Wikidata, the category American
women writers has 1479 articles. 651 of them currently have a main type
(GND), 328 have a sex, 162 have an occupation, 111 have a country of
citizenship, 49 have a sexual orientation, 39 have a place of birth, etc.
From: jc@sahnwaldt.de
Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 16:28:14 +0200
To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Hi Pat,
I've been involved with DBpedia for several years, so these are
interesting thoughts.
On 5 May 2013 01:25, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
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).
Do you mean just the file dbpedia-ontology.owl or the DBpedia ontology
in general? We still use OWL as our main format for publishing the
ontology. The file is generated automatically. Maybe the generation
process could be improved.
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.
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
Thanks!
Christopher
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael
Hale
Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM
To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category
system
and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata
will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface that
causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be able
to
automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article.
DBpedia
currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many
editing
scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content
scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and
then including it in articles instead of just extracting information
from
articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get
comfortable
with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical
reader
that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of
similar
people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a
category. I
did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine
sizes,
and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is totally
worth
the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has a
lot
of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries. I've
been
making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category system.
You
can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football
league
popularity split by language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing
I'm
currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for
Baidu
Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200
From: jane023@gmail.com
To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories
began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by
severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category
user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of
a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little
synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being
able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata
sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current
category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some
category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split
them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent
media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this
is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia
readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction
to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the
potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in
Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the
recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not
have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions
instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it
would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category
system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it
has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the
various
infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion
of this particular issue.
-- Chris
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2013/5/5 Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com:
As far as checking the import progress of Wikidata, the category American women writers has 1479 articles. 651 of them currently have a main type (GND), 328 have a sex, 162 have an occupation, 111 have a country of citizenship, 49 have a sexual orientation, 39 have a place of birth, etc.
This means that we need to hurry a bit about inserting the right properties in the related item. :)
I think this could be - partially - done by bots: I mean, we know they are/were American, females, and writers... We can start from here.
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?
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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.
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Mathieu Stumpf psychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:
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.
The Q-numbers are randomly assigned (except for a few easter eggs). They have no relation to the importance of the item they represent or its place in any kind of ontology.
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Technical Projects
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Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
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Le 2013-05-06 11:14, Lydia Pintscher a écrit :
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Mathieu Stumpf psychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:
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.
The Q-numbers are randomly assigned (except for a few easter eggs). They have no relation to the importance of the item they represent or its place in any kind of ontology.
Easter eggs are cultural bias. In fact, the term easter egg itself is a western cultural reference. But I think you are missing the point as I was talking mainly about DBpedia ontology, I was just taking this Q-code examples to say that to my mind DBpedia have the same kind of cultural bias. Maybe cultural bias may sound ruder than what I mean, I'm not trying to "blame" anyone, it is clear that I also have my own cultural biases, which I don't pretend to be better or worse than any other.
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 wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
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.
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.
Sent from my iPad
On May 6, 2013, at 12:00 PM, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt 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 wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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.
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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 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 wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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.
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"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? 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> 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%29https://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 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-**discussionhttps://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**> wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf <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/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-**discussionhttps://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.
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Though it may not be useful to have a "cycle" in an "ontology", I do think we should avoid creating structures that make a "cycle" impossible, and I also believe in supporting more than one ontology. Please note that new articles on the English Wikipedia are "automatically" nominated for deletion when they have zero categories.
2013/5/7, emw emw.wiki@gmail.com:
"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? 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> 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%29https://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 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-**discussionhttps://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**> wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf <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/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-**discussionhttps://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.
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Le 2013-05-07 14:01, emw 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."
Can someone give an example of where it would be useful to have a cycle in an ontology? 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 [6] (thing).
Well, to stay on my idea of building an ontology from the "perception" concept, from perception you can spawn awarness (perceive that you perceive), from what you can span definition, from what you can define perception. Ok I'm lean on the details here and you probably need more concepts and relations to go from perception to definition, but you get the idea. Moreover I already gave an example with cross-ontology relations.
What would be the motivation of using a graph as you describe? Is there particural purpose for such a choice?
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf 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 [5]
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.
Links:
[1] http://mappings.dbpedia.org/ [2] http://mappings.dbpedia.org/server/ontology/classes/ [3] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_%28graph_theory%29 [6] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120
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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
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I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different ranks to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing).
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf 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 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 wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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
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
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
--
Association Culture-Libre
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
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
--
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*)
Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf
Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
I spoke too soon. That is the only loop at two steps. But if you go out three steps (25000 categories) you find another 23 loops. Organizational studies <-> organizations, housing -> household behavior and family economics -> home -> housing, religious pluralism <-> religious persecution, secularism <-> religious pluralism, learning -> inductive reasoning -> scientific theories -> sociological theories -> social systems -> society -> education -> learning, etc.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 11:31:24 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different ranks to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing).
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf 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 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 wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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
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
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
--
Association Culture-Libre
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
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
--
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*)
Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf
Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Pardon the spam, but it is only 2000 categories. Four steps would be 25000.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 12:10:51 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I spoke too soon. That is the only loop at two steps. But if you go out three steps (25000 categories) you find another 23 loops. Organizational studies <-> organizations, housing -> household behavior and family economics -> home -> housing, religious pluralism <-> religious persecution, secularism <-> religious pluralism, learning -> inductive reasoning -> scientific theories -> sociological theories -> social systems -> society -> education -> learning, etc.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 11:31:24 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different ranks to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing).
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf 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 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 wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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
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
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
--
Association Culture-Libre
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
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
--
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*)
Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf
Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org
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What is interesting about categories, is that no matter how shaky the system is, these are pretty much the only meta data that there is for articles, because as I said before, just about every article has one. The weakness of DBpedia is that it is only programmed to pick up articles with infoboxes, and there just aren't that many of those.
2013/5/7, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com:
Pardon the spam, but it is only 2000 categories. Four steps would be 25000.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 12:10:51 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I spoke too soon. That is the only loop at two steps. But if you go out three steps (25000 categories) you find another 23 loops. Organizational studies <-> organizations, housing -> household behavior and family economics -> home -> housing, religious pluralism <-> religious persecution, secularism <-> religious pluralism, learning -> inductive reasoning -> scientific theories -> sociological theories -> social systems -> society -> education -> learning, etc.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 11:31:24 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different ranks to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing). On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <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> 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 Stumpfpsychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpfpsychoslave@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.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list 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 -- Association Culture-Libre http://www.culture-libre.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list 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
-- Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*) Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann Research Group: http://aksw.org
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
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Guys! You can continue this conversion in a more public place like WD:PC It's bothering for people like me to receive e-mail every five minutes in a topic which I'm not interested So please continue this in a somewhere else
On 5/7/13, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
What is interesting about categories, is that no matter how shaky the system is, these are pretty much the only meta data that there is for articles, because as I said before, just about every article has one. The weakness of DBpedia is that it is only programmed to pick up articles with infoboxes, and there just aren't that many of those.
2013/5/7, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com:
Pardon the spam, but it is only 2000 categories. Four steps would be 25000.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 12:10:51 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I spoke too soon. That is the only loop at two steps. But if you go out three steps (25000 categories) you find another 23 loops. Organizational studies <-> organizations, housing -> household behavior and family economics -> home -> housing, religious pluralism <-> religious persecution, secularism <-> religious pluralism, learning -> inductive reasoning -> scientific theories -> sociological theories -> social systems -> society -> education -> learning, etc.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 11:31:24 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different ranks to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing). On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <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> 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 Stumpfpsychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpfpsychoslave@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.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list 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 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
-- Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*) Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann Research Group: http://aksw.org
Wikidata-l mailing list 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
Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
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Sorry, I'm not used to using watchlists to have conversations, but I am used to deleting email threads. My conclusion is that I support any effort to make Wikipedia become more alive, interactive, or otherwise better.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 21:15:14 +0430 From: ladsgroup@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Guys! You can continue this conversion in a more public place like WD:PC It's bothering for people like me to receive e-mail every five minutes in a topic which I'm not interested So please continue this in a somewhere else
On 5/7/13, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
What is interesting about categories, is that no matter how shaky the system is, these are pretty much the only meta data that there is for articles, because as I said before, just about every article has one. The weakness of DBpedia is that it is only programmed to pick up articles with infoboxes, and there just aren't that many of those.
2013/5/7, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com:
Pardon the spam, but it is only 2000 categories. Four steps would be 25000.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 12:10:51 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I spoke too soon. That is the only loop at two steps. But if you go out three steps (25000 categories) you find another 23 loops. Organizational studies <-> organizations, housing -> household behavior and family economics -> home -> housing, religious pluralism <-> religious persecution, secularism <-> religious pluralism, learning -> inductive reasoning -> scientific theories -> sociological theories -> social systems -> society -> education -> learning, etc.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 11:31:24 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different ranks to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing). On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <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> 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 Stumpfpsychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpfpsychoslave@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.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list 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 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
-- Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*) Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann Research Group: http://aksw.org
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-- Amir
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On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 7:40 PM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
What is interesting about categories, is that no matter how shaky the system is, these are pretty much the only meta data that there is for articles, because as I said before, just about every article has one. The weakness of DBpedia is that it is only programmed to pick up articles with infoboxes, and there just aren't that many of those.
That is not true actually. DBpedia picks up (almost) everything except from talk & user pages
2013/5/7, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com:
Pardon the spam, but it is only 2000 categories. Four steps would be
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 12:10:51 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I spoke too soon. That is the only loop at two steps. But if you go out three steps (25000 categories) you find another 23 loops. Organizational studies <-> organizations, housing -> household behavior and family economics -> home -> housing, religious pluralism <-> religious
persecution,
secularism <-> religious pluralism, learning -> inductive reasoning -> scientific theories -> sociological theories -> social systems ->
society ->
education -> learning, etc.
From: hale.michael.jr@live.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 11:31:24 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I don't know if these are useful, but if we go two steps from the fundamental categories on the English Wikipedia we find several loops. Knowledge contains information and information contains knowledge, for example. Not allowing loops might force you to have to give different
ranks
to two categories that are equally important.
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 16:41:45 +0200 From: hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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 (thing). On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <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> 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 Stumpfpsychoslave@culture-libre.org wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpfpsychoslave@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.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
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-- Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*) Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann Research Group: http://aksw.org
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[resending with extra long text trimmed]
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
What is interesting about categories, is that no matter how shaky the system is, these are pretty much the only meta data that there is for articles, because as I said before, just about every article has one.
The biggest weakness with Wikipedia categories, in my opinion, is in how they are used, rather than anything to do with the underlying technical implementation.
Going back to the original example of "American women writers" one is, in my experience, just as likely to find listed a book with a title like "Women Authors of the United States in the 20th Century" as one is to find actual female scriveners. Wikipedians seem to interpret them not so much as "categories" but "things which might be of interest to people who were interested in this label."
Perhaps if the editors had the ability to say "relatedTopic" in addition to "categoryMember" this behavior could be re-shaped in the future.
Tom
Should we have more than one ontology? It depends on what you want to do with your ontology(s). Multiple logically incompatible ontologies are now built and used by different groups that have no need to communicate with each other. But when they do want to communicate, the incompatibility creates big problems.
Different points of view can be represented by different theories (or 'beliefs) using the same common set of basic terms (i.e. within a single, logically sound ontology). This is the best way, so that the ways in which theories or beliefs actually differ can be precisely specified using a common universally understood vocabulary. In fact, if we didn't have a commonly understood set of basic terms, we would never be able to tell that we have different theories or beliefs or how they differ.
The benefits of a logically sound ontology as contrasted with a controlled terminology are the ability to do logical inferencing. In the classic example, if Jack and Joe both have the same parents we can infer that they are siblings. It gets a lot more complicated, and more useful. Therefore it is possible to have all local ontologies represented by a common logical language (i.e. a common foundation ontology). This provide the local flexibility to use terms and theories at will, while providing the maximum degree of accurate communication between the local communities of users. When different communities use different terms to mean the same thing, the common foundation ontology provides a means for automatic translation. The DBpedia ontology could serve this purpose, and I hope it is developed for that purpose, because the range of topics that it needs to represent are unlimited. Why settle for anything less?
Pat
Patrick Cassidy MICRA Inc. cassidy@micra.com 908-561-3416
-----Original Message----- From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: Monday, May 06, 2013 12:14 PM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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.
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.
Sent from my iPad
On May 6, 2013, at 12:00 PM, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt 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
wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
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Hi Patrick,
Op 8-5-2013 17:19, Patrick Cassidy schreef:
Should we have more than one ontology?
Back in 2001 when I was doing some artificial intelligence courses, the semantic web was the next big thing. What I remember about ontology is that an ontology of all is next to impossible. Most ontologies work very well in a certain domain, but if you go outside of this domain it won't be correct or become nonsense. So we should accept that we have multiple (overlapping) ontologies that are not redundant, but complementary to each other.
Maarten
I think it is a perfectly good and noble ambition to strive for "a logically sound ontology as contrasted with a controlled terminology". I just don't believe it is attainable. Perhaps you could build it by including all existing non-compatible ontologies. I had an interesting conversation about tagging last month, in which it was stated that enough tagging could cause new ontologies to appear through organic growth. I find that an interesting concept. Our Wikipedia category tree structures are being built vertically and horizontally around a few main categories like "Category:People" that slowly get split off into subcategories such as "Category:People praying on stained glass windows" as they get too large, whereas a tagging system could lead to the formation of new categories for which there is no parent category (as yet).
2013/5/8, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com:
Should we have more than one ontology? It depends on what you want to do with your ontology(s). Multiple logically incompatible ontologies are now built and used by different groups that have no need to communicate with each other. But when they do want to communicate, the incompatibility creates big problems.
Different points of view can be represented by different theories (or 'beliefs) using the same common set of basic terms (i.e. within a single, logically sound ontology). This is the best way, so that the ways in which theories or beliefs actually differ can be precisely specified using a common universally understood vocabulary. In fact, if we didn't have a commonly understood set of basic terms, we would never be able to tell that we have different theories or beliefs or how they differ.
The benefits of a logically sound ontology as contrasted with a controlled terminology are the ability to do logical inferencing. In the classic example, if Jack and Joe both have the same parents we can infer that they are siblings. It gets a lot more complicated, and more useful. Therefore it is possible to have all local ontologies represented by a common logical language (i.e. a common foundation ontology). This provide the local flexibility to use terms and theories at will, while providing the maximum degree of accurate communication between the local communities of users. When different communities use different terms to mean the same thing, the common foundation ontology provides a means for automatic translation. The DBpedia ontology could serve this purpose, and I hope it is developed for that purpose, because the range of topics that it needs to represent are unlimited. Why settle for anything less?
Pat
Patrick Cassidy MICRA Inc. cassidy@micra.com 908-561-3416
-----Original Message----- From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: Monday, May 06, 2013 12:14 PM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
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.
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.
Sent from my iPad
On May 6, 2013, at 12:00 PM, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt 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
wrote:
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :
On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf 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.
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My only concern is that tags make me think of Twitter. They have prolific tagging but don't use it to form a category system. We already have categories for people, prayer, and stained glass. It seems that you really want a page that lets you view the contents of not just one category, but from multiple categories connected with "and", "or", and "not".
Date: Thu, 9 May 2013 12:05:02 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it is a perfectly good and noble ambition to strive for "a logically sound ontology as contrasted with a controlled terminology". I just don't believe it is attainable. Perhaps you could build it by including all existing non-compatible ontologies. I had an interesting conversation about tagging last month, in which it was stated that enough tagging could cause new ontologies to appear through organic growth. I find that an interesting concept. Our Wikipedia category tree structures are being built vertically and horizontally around a few main categories like "Category:People" that slowly get split off into subcategories such as "Category:People praying on stained glass windows" as they get too large, whereas a tagging system could lead to the formation of new categories for which there is no parent category (as yet).
Yes, that's exactly what I want. Let's say you have an ontology based on People and you have an ontology based on Places and when you intersect them for the geolocated coordinates of your handheld smartphone, you get the homes or other timed-event-locations of famous people through the centuries near where you are standing. This user-scenario assumes of course that you are standing in a Wikipedia-rich landscape somewhere in the Western world...
2013/5/9, Michael Hale hale.michael.jr@live.com:
My only concern is that tags make me think of Twitter. They have prolific tagging but don't use it to form a category system. We already have categories for people, prayer, and stained glass. It seems that you really want a page that lets you view the contents of not just one category, but from multiple categories connected with "and", "or", and "not".
Date: Thu, 9 May 2013 12:05:02 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it is a perfectly good and noble ambition to strive for "a logically sound ontology as contrasted with a controlled terminology". I just don't believe it is attainable. Perhaps you could build it by including all existing non-compatible ontologies. I had an interesting conversation about tagging last month, in which it was stated that enough tagging could cause new ontologies to appear through organic growth. I find that an interesting concept. Our Wikipedia category tree structures are being built vertically and horizontally around a few main categories like "Category:People" that slowly get split off into subcategories such as "Category:People praying on stained glass windows" as they get too large, whereas a tagging system could lead to the formation of new categories for which there is no parent category (as yet).
Jane Darnell suggestged:
I think it is a perfectly good and noble ambition to strive for "a logically sound ontology as contrasted with a controlled terminology". I just don't believe it is attainable.
Logically sound ontologies have been built and used for years - they are not only possible, but multiple examples exist. The CYC ontology (under development since 1985) has over 100,000 categories, and has been used commercially on large projects, and is well-structured and exhaustively tested.
Now, if one wants to say that "an ontology of everything" cannot be built, because of logically incompatible views, beliefs, or assumptions, then that may be true if one assumes that *all* assertions in an ontology must be logically consistent and contained within a single theory, but one needs to understand that logically incompatible theories *can* be included in a single sound ontology, because they can be circumscribed, isolated, and *specified* as logically incompatible theories, and the reasoner would never attempt to include any two incompatible theories in a reasoning process. One may structure those incompatible theories in various ways, such as in sub-ontologies (or CYC microtheories). And the reasoner can interpret all those theories, based on the foundation categories of the ontology, which are self-consistent. Humans have many incompatible beliefs, but most people can "understand" the differing beliefs of religious systems, even while agreeing with only a few or even zero (by not accepting assumptions or the reasoning process of those belief systems). Computers can "interpret" the facts asserted in an ontology, though not yet as deeply as people; but our goal is for the computers to "interpret" assertions (i.e. to recognize implications) so that it can reason with them, to the extent that they can be reasoned with. OF course, at this stage, computers do not "understand" to the depth that people do, they can only use whatever is asserted or inferrible from the assertions they have been given; but that amount of information is still absolutely massive. We and our computers know the pitfalls of logical inconsistency and know how to avoid them. The point is, that we can do a great deal of valid and useful reasoning within self-consistent theories (which is why CYC is organized by "microtheories" that are self-consistent). The residual question is, how much can we include in a single self-consistent theory, and the answer is "a great deal". The COSMO ontology has over 7000 categories and over 800 relations, and is logically consistent using both the Pellet and Fact++ reasoners on the OWL ontology. This is not trivial, because the ontology has multiple "disjoint" relations and over 2000 restrictions, any one of which can cause an inconsistency if one gets sloppy adding new classes or instances. CYC is many times more sophisticated, with years of practical application. There are no "disjoint" relations or restrictions in the current OWL version of the DBpedia ontology, so there may be no contradictions based on those elements, but the "Pellet" reasoner in Protege still immediately bombs when invoked, so there are constructions that are in some way inconsistent. With effort they can be tracked down and eliminated, but there are more immediate problems with the hierarchy and relations (properties) that I think should be addressed first. Contradictions will always come when one tries to add more detail to make the meanings of the categories less ambiguous (so that, for example, proper labels in all languages that carry the true meaning can be assigned), because no person can (in one lifetime) anticipate those contradictions by doing the kind of thorough reasoning that the computer reasoners can do when it views all of the logical implications.
For a particular purpose such as DBpedia, one will ideally develop the ontology stepwise while verifying at each step that the ontology serves the intended purpose - as it seems has been done thus far. But the development of any such ontology can be greatly accelerated, and its soundness assured, and its functionality enhanced, by relating the categories and relations to those of existing ontologies that have been shown to be logically sound. For DBpedia, where the existing ontology is rather small in comparison to many that have been built, this is a perfectly feasible task.
I am trying to get a good grasp of the existing structure and use of the DBpedia class system and ontology, so that I can make some suggestions for improvement. I'm not sure how long this will take. I think this effort is very worthwhile because the Wikipedia is an almost ideal environment, both large enough and small enough to provide a test case for detailed use of the reasoning capability of a properly structured ontology. The reasoning allows many things to be inferred that are not explicitly stated, greatly enhancing the power of the Wikipedia itself.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy MICRA Inc. cassidy@micra.com 908-561-3416
If you are going to use a computer to automatically generate new facts using an ontology then you have to do fairly sophisticated filtering of the results. If you start with just a few axioms for logic and Euclidean geometry you could have a computer automatically prove new theorems using them forever. Most of the results would be boring though. To identify the gems like the proof that there are only 5 Platonic solids requires you to analyze the network of results that are produced to find the elegant, interesting, useful, powerful, surprising, deep, and important ones. See Wolfram's note on empirical metamathematics: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1176b-text
Yes, of course, no one is interested in every possible inference. That is why they generate queries in, e.g. SPARQL, which uses inferencing to find the values that fit the query variables. But without proper assertions in the ontology for the reasoned to work with, some or even all true answers will never be generated. The query variables serve as the "filter" that you correctly state is necessary.
Pat.
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hale Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 8:22 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
If you are going to use a computer to automatically generate new facts using an ontology then you have to do fairly sophisticated filtering of the results. If you start with just a few axioms for logic and Euclidean geometry you could have a computer automatically prove new theorems using them forever. Most of the results would be boring though. To identify the gems like the proof that there are only 5 Platonic solids requires you to analyze the network of results that are produced to find the elegant, interesting, useful, powerful, surprising, deep, and important ones.
See Wolfram's note on empirical metamathematics: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1176b-text
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
Logically sound ontologies have been built and used for years - they are not only possible, but multiple examples exist. The CYC ontology (under development since 1985) has over 100,000 categories, and has been used commercially on large projects, and is well-structured and exhaustively tested.
Cyc actually started in 1984. Wikipedia started in 2001. Which has made more progress?
Could you give some examples of where Cyc has been used successfully commercially? The Wikipedia page has a couple of projects under development, but nothing actually deployed.
Tom
Hmm - depends on what you mean by "progress". The CYC group originally started as an industry consortium , then after ten years became a private organization. Its size has varied mostly from twenty-five to fifty employees. Its early phases depended a lot on Department of Defense projects. DoD required that CYC release its basic ontology, which is now freely available as "OpenCYC". It full ontology is a lot larger and more sophisticated. More recently, they completed a several-year project for the Cleveland Clinic, using the ontology to integrate their many databases. Database integration is probably the most immediately useful application for an ontology. Problem is, such projects are always proprietary. We know that a number of companies have used ontologies (not only CYC, but SUMO and other as well) but we have no access to the results. There have been proposals to build public-domain ontologies to demonstrate their use, but those proposals have not been funded. Money is the main problem. Supporting 25-50 people would be considered "progress" in my view. I would be curious to know if anyone is making money from use of the DBpedia ontology. That could be instructive, if we could see what they are doing.
And the proprietary nature of commercial applications is precisely the reason that I have spent time building the COSMO ontology. If the full CYC were public domain, I would just be using it and modifying it, primarily for Natural Language understanding tasks. As it is, the COSMO includes much of the top level of OpenCYC, the parts that are not peculiarly designed for the CYC reasoner. It also includes parts of SUMO, DOLCE, and a few other top-level ontologies, plus a lot that is not in any of those ontologies. The function of the COSMO is to enable accurate interoperability as a public-domain resource - to serve as a common language for computer applications that use logical inferencing and want to communicate accurately. To demonstrate that it can function that way, there needs to be more than one local application that uses it and communicates with other users. The DBpedia could be one.
The biggest problem in getting local groups to adopt a common foundation ontology has been the widespread misunderstanding about the nature of basic ontologies. It is not "impossible" to have one logic-based computer language to serve as a means of communication between local applications; it is both possible and necessary, if one wants accurate communication. Local enterprises build data warehouses to integrate their databases, and they work fine internally, but cannot communicate with other data warehouses because they do not rely on a common basic language. If you want evidence that, when properly motivated, people will all learn a common language, go to any international scientific conference and try to talk in Urdu or Warlpiri. The good news about use of a common foundation ontology is that, in any local group that wants to use it for external communication, there needs to be only one member who is "bilingual" in both the local terminology and the common foundation ontology, to translate those elements that need to be communicated.
If anyone is interested in an objective discussion of how to use a foundation ontology for interoperability, I will be happy to spend time explaining the principles. Or one can look at the ppt or Word discussion at http://micra.com/COSMO. I would prefer not to engage in rhetorical debates.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tom Morris Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 10:12 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
Logically sound ontologies have been built and used for years - they are not only possible, but multiple examples exist. The CYC ontology (under development since 1985) has over 100,000 categories, and has been used commercially on large projects, and is well-structured and exhaustively tested.
Cyc actually started in 1984. Wikipedia started in 2001. Which has made more progress?
Could you give some examples of where Cyc has been used successfully commercially? The Wikipedia page has a couple of projects under development, but nothing actually deployed.
Tom
Hi Christopher and Michael, Thanks for the replies. My comments were based on the OWL ontology for DBpedia_3.8.owl. I will look at the references that you provided and prepare a more detailed discussion. Some urgent business has arisen requiring my attention for a day or two.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy MICRA Inc. cassidy@micra.com 908-561-3416
-----Original Message----- From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2013 10:28 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Hi Pat,
I've been involved with DBpedia for several years, so these are interesting thoughts.
On 5 May 2013 01:25, Patrick Cassidy pat@micra.com wrote:
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).
Do you mean just the file dbpedia-ontology.owl or the DBpedia ontology in general? We still use OWL as our main format for publishing the ontology. The file is generated automatically. Maybe the generation process could be improved.
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.
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
Thanks!
Christopher
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
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael
Hale
Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 2:57 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category
system
and semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and
Wikidata
will converge over time and develop a simple enough query interface
that
causes fewer people to use the category system because we will be
able to
automatically generate relevant queries related to a given article.
DBpedia
currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for many
editing
scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata
and
then including it in articles instead of just extracting information
from
articles. If you are familiar with query languages you can get
comfortable
with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes, but for a typical
reader
that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of
similar
people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a
category. I
did a test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine
sizes,
and I think for the types of things it enables you to do it is
totally worth
the learning curve. That being said, I think the category system has
a lot
of potential for better browsing scenarios as opposed to queries.
I've been
making a tool that mixes the article view data with the category
system. You
can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football
league
popularity split by language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wakebrdkid/Popular_category_browsing I'm
currently multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account
for Baidu
Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 From: jane023@gmail.com To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour
of
a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and
being
able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the
current
category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it,
some
category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people
split
them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great
introduction
to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney voldrani@gmail.com:
I am just curious if there has ever been discussion about the potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that
the
recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would
not
have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as
it
has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the
various
infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any
discussion
of this particular issue.
-- Chris
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