[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikide-l] semantic wikipedia?

[Jakob Voss]

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