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.

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(a)micra.com To: wikidata-l(a)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(a)micra.com 908-561-3416 From: wikidata-l-bounces(a)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. Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200 would not various _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

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(a)micra.com> wrote: 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. 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

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(a)live.com> wrote:

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(a)gmail.com To: wikidata-l(a)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(a)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(a)live.com> wrote: > > > >> > > > > > > >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> > >> > >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> > >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

Le dimanche 05 mai 2013 à 16:28 +0200, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a 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?

Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : 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.

Le 2013-05-06 11:14, Lydia Pintscher a écrit : 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.

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(a)sahnwaldt.de> wrote:

"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(a)culture-libre.org&gt; wrote:

Le 2013-05-07 14:01, emw a écrit : 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? -- Association Culture-Libre http://www.culture-libre.org/

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(a)informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l(a)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 &lt;psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; 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 &lt;jc(a)sahnwaldt.de&gt; 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 &lt;psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; wrote: Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf &lt;psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)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(a)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(a)live.com To: wikidata-l(a)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(a)live.com To: wikidata-l(a)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(a)informatik.uni-leipzig.de To: wikidata-l(a)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 &lt;psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; 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 &lt;jc(a)sahnwaldt.de&gt; 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 &lt;psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; wrote: Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf &lt;psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

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 &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Amir

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 7:40 PM, Jane Darnell &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: That is not true actually. DBpedia picks up (almost) everything except from talk & user pages -- Kontokostas Dimitris

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(a)micra.com 908-561-3416

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 &lt;pat(a)micra.com&gt;om>:

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 &lt;hale.michael.jr(a)live.com&gt;om>:

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 &lt;pat(a)micra.com&gt; wrote: 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(a)micra.com 908-561-3416