Peter Ansell wrote:
> 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.
>
Well, the dbpedia ontology already has concepts in it that don't
seem to exist (in concrete form) inside Wikipedia. For instance,
Wikipedia doesn't have well-defined categories for "Person" or
"Automobile Model", instead it's got this network of categories like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_athlete-politicians
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1980s_automobiles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Front_wheel_drive_vehicles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Honda_vehicles
then you've got those awful List pages...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honda_vehicles
Simply by creating a category like "Person" that doesn't really exist in
wikipedia, the dbpedia ontology is already going beyond simply
reflecting wikipedia and towards interpreting it.
This isn't a problem, in my mind, because it's a finite problem. I
don't think there's a big disagreement about how to define the function
IsAPerson(DbPediaUrl x). Secondly, Persons are one of a limited number
of major categories that exist in wikipedia.
-------
To go the other way, there are a lot of places where wikipedia is very
well organized, and that organization isn't reflected in the dbpedia
ontology: for instance, drugs are being gradually classified according
to the WHO's ontology for drugs, so you find entries like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serzone
that are coded into very solid categories. At the moment
psychopharmaceuticals are very well coded, although things aren't so
good when you go to other drugs, say
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeprazole
even there, Wikipedia is using external identifiers for chemical
substances and drugs, so you can easily get the ATC code for drugs even
if they aren't built into the category network.
In other places there seems to be a complete allergy to using external
identifiers. It drives me up the wall, for instance, that neither
wikipedia nor freebase has FIPS codes for US counties, for instance.
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