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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