Iain Sproat wrote:
> Are we agreed that a freebase topic is a symset (and vice versa)?
>
Here's a better example of a topic that has two meanings,
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/oxygen
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
Wikipedia goes right out and says it..."This article is about the
chemical element and its most stable form, O_2 or dioxygen. For other
forms of this element, see Allotropes of Oxygen."
This is annoying because you can't make entirely truthful statements
about "Oxygen" if you conflate the element and the diatomic gas. For
instance, most of the mass of the ocean (water) is the ElementOxygen.
If a system also understood that people breathe "Oxygen" it could come
to the wrong conclusion that people can breathe in the ocean.
Note that freebase treats oxygen as a "Chemical Element", but also
a "Medical Treatment"; the Medical Treatment is the use of the diatomic
gas, which doesn't appear to be otherwise documented in Freebase.
The text in wikipedia does a good job at explaining the taxonomy of
substances: reading it, it makes clear distinctions between elements,
compounds, allotropes, etc. So far, generic databases have done a
poor job of taxonomizing "stuff". It seems to me that the problem is
tractable, but people have stopped short of the work it takes to do
it: an introductory chemistry textbook does a good job of explaining it
that bypasses the "representational thorns" that Cyc and other efforts
have gotten caught up on.
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