2009/7/31 Paul Houle <[email protected]>: > Peter Ansell wrote: >> >> What would change if there were disjoint statements? Are disjoint >> declarations used for more than just verifying that dbpedia is >> consistent? >> > > There are a lot of uses. I wouldn't trivialize the verification part > either: the wikipedia "street level" view hides serious consistency > problems that look quite embarrassing from 8000 feet up: if you're making a > product that gives people that 8000 foot view and you don't want to get > laughed out of town, you need to deal with them. Also certain inference > procedures will fail when applied to inconsistent data, so providing a > consistent view is an important processing step
Consistency would be nice, but relying on it being there might permanently make DBpedia unuseful for strict reasoners, as to change something in DBpedia you effectively have to convince the active editors on Wikipedia that there is an issue. And they don't take kindly to being pushed into positions without long reasoning. If you have ideas for reforming the category structure at Wikipedia then feel free to try, but you won't get a result there without a lot of effort. SemWeb ventures that attempt to do too much already get laughed out of town, but DBpedia seems to have struck a balance, due mostly to the effort by all of the volunteer editors at Wikipedia (although the transformation to RDF definitely takes another level of effort to maintain). Trying to maintain a different category structure in DBpedia to that in Wikipedia is bound to fail due to this reliance on the Wikipedia editors to maintain the millions of different subjects in the way they know best. > Note that the dbpedia ontology isn't really an ontology of the world, > it's really an ontology about wikipedia entries, and it might be a little > less tight than something like Cyc would be. For instance, the > intersection between "Place" and "Organization" has 147 members, and it's > not crazy -- many organizations conduct all activities at a single place, > such as I wouldn't expect DBpedia to represent a world ontology given that it is a best effort to make the wealth of incomplete information in the many different language versions of Wikipedia available for computers to utilise in some way and offers the ontology as a layer on top of that. Cheers, Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
