This is a very ambitious, but commendable, goal. To map all data on the web to the DBpedia ontology is a huge undertaking that will take many years of effort. However, if it can be accomplished the potential payoff is also huge and could result in the realization of a true Semantic Web. Just as with any very large and complex software development effort, there needs to be a structured approach to achieving the desired results. That structured approach probably involves a clear requirements analysis and resulting requirements documentation. It also requires a design document and an implementation document, as well as risk assessment and risk mitigation. While there is no bigger believer in the "build a little, test a little" rapid prototyping approach to development, I don't think that is appropriate for a project of this size and complexity. Also, the size and complexity also suggest the final product will likely be beyond the scope of any individual to fully comprehend the overall ontological structure. Therefore, a reasonable approach might be to break the effort into smaller, comprehensible segments. Since this is a large ontology development effort, segmenting the ontology into domains of interest and creating working groups to focus on each domain might be a workable approach. There would also need to be a working group that focus on the top levels of the ontology and monitors the domain working groups to ensure overall compatibility and reduce the likelihood of duplicate or overlapping concepts in the upper levels of the ontology and treats universal concepts such as space and time consistently. There also needs to be a clear, and hopefully simple, approach to mapping data on the web to the DBpedia ontology that will accommodate both large data developers and web site developers. It would be wonderful to see the worldwide web community get behind such an initiative and make rapid progress in realizing this commendable goal. However, just as special interests defeated the goal of having a universal software development approach (Ada), I fear the same sorts of special interests will likely result in a continuation of the current myriad development efforts. I understand the "one size doesn't fit all" arguments, but I also think "one size could fit a whole lot" could be the case here. Respectfully, John Flynn http://semanticsimulations.com *From:* Sebastian Hellmann [mailto:hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de] *Sent:* Wednesday, March 11, 2015 3:12 AM *To:* Tom Morris; Dimitris Kontokostas *Cc:* Wikidata Discussion List; dbpedia-ontology; dbpedia-discussion(a)lists.sourceforge.net; DBpedia-Developers *Subject:* Re: [Dbpedia-discussion] [Dbpedia-developers] DBpedia-based RDF dumps for Wikidata Dear Tom, let me try to answer this question in a more general way. In the future, we honestly consider to map all data on the web to the DBpedia ontology (extending it where it makes sense). We hope that this will enable you to query many data sets on the Web using the same queries. As a convenience measure, we will get a huge download server that provides all data from a single point in consistent formats and consistent metadata, classified by the DBpedia Ontology. Wikidata is just one example, there is also commons, Wiktionary (hopefully via DBnary), data from companies, DBpedia members and EU projects. all the best, Sebastian On 11.03.2015 06:11, Tom Morris wrote: Dimitris, Soren, and DBpedia team, That sounds like an interesting project, but I got lost between the statement of intent, below, and the practical consequences: On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Dimitris Kontokostas < kontokostas(a)informatik.uni-leipzig.de&gt; wrote: we made some different design choices and map wikidata data directly into the DBpedia ontology. What, from your point of view, is the practical consequence of these different design choices? How do the end results manifest themselves to the consumers? Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-developers mailing list Dbpedia-developers(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-developers -- Sebastian Hellmann AKSW/NLP2RDF research group Insitute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) and DBpedia Association Events: * *Feb 9th, 2015* 3rd DBpedia Community Meeting in Dublin <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/Dublin2015> * *May 29th, 2015* Submission deadline SEMANTiCS 2015 * *Sept 15th-17th, 2015* SEMANTiCS 2015 (formerly i-SEMANTICS), Vienna <http://semantics.cc/> Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf Projects: http://dbpedia.org, http://nlp2rdf.org, http://linguistics.okfn.org, https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt <http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt> Homepage: http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann Research Group: http://aksw.org Thesis: http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis-summary http://tinyurl.com/sh-thesis

without thinking about how the two could evolve / compete / cooperate / thrive.