hi

Kai Kumpf wrote:

has anyone ever considered overlaying Wikipedia with a kind of ontology as offered by e.g. Roget's Thesaurus or, even better: OpenCyc? I personally guess that this would boost Wikipedia's usefulness enormously.

If you want to overlay wikipedia with an ontology you have to provide a way to edit this ontology parallely to wikipedia articles.

Some month ago there was a guy at meta.wikipedia trying to invent a new "semantic" wikitax. In my opinion high goals but little chances of success. The "boost of usefullness" leads to many disadvantages for any contributor (have you ever tried to create an ontology with more than one person?) - if your'e not familiar with editing ontologies, try Protégé (it's open source) - you'll see why Wikis are not the right tool for this kind of purposes.

By the way Roget's Thesaurus is no Ontology nor an ontology-like thesaurus but a linguistic one (a kind of dictionary). Maybe wiktionary can lead to a thesaurus, but as far as I can see there are different opinions about what sort of dictionary (there are many!) wiktionary should be.

The first step to any ontology is to distinguish concepts and terms and the only way to get any kind of ontology out of wikipedia is to consequentely eliminate (links to) disambiguation "articles".

Kai Krumpf schrieb:

Hallo hat schon mal jemand darueber nachgedacht, ob oder wie man Wikipedia nicht mit einer Ontologie, wie sie in Thesauri zu finden ist, oder public domain wie in OpenCyc? Ich vermute, dass der Nutzwert von Wikipedia dadurch einen immensen Schub erfahren wuerde.

Naja, ich bin da eher skeptisch (aber ich bin kein NPOV, da ich mich intensiv mit Thesauri, Ontologien, Systematiken etc. beschäftige)

Gruß, Jakob