I just found another annoying "feature" of both dbpedia 3.4 and 3.5.
Some cites, like this one
http://dbpedia.org/page/Dresden
have an rdf:type of "dbpedia-owl:City" as one would expect. On the
other hand, there are a lot of major "cities" which don't have this
type, such as
http://dbpedia.org/page/Tokyo
http://dbpedia.org/page/New_York_City <http://dbpedia.org/page/Tokyo>
http://dbpedia.org/page/London <http://dbpedia.org/page/Tokyo>
http://dbpedia.org/page/Los_Angeles <http://dbpedia.org/page/Tokyo>
http://dbpedia.org/page/Paris <http://dbpedia.org/page/Tokyo>
http://dbpedia.org/page/São_Paulo <http://dbpedia.org/page/S%C3%A3o_Paulo>
To be fair, these are all in as 'populated places' so there are
infoboxes with useful information about these places.
First I thought that a lot of the above "cities" aren't really
"Cities" in the technical sense of the word, for instance, Tokyo and
London are both composite entities that consist of multiple cities.
(NYC really is a legal city, but the 5 boroughs are third-level
administrative subdivisions!) But then I looked at some cities which
aren't so ontologically challenged:
http://dbpedia.org/page/Ithaca,_New_York (ok, there is a "City Of" and
"Town Of" Ithaca, like you often see in New York state)
http://dbpedia.org/page/Manchester,_New_Hampshire
and found that these don't have an rdf:type of "City" either. The
moral seems to be that the "City" type in dbpedia isn't all that useful
currently. There is a type, however, in Freebase
http://www.freebase.com/view/location/citytown
which is a bit more accurately assigned and roughly corresponds to
"Municipality" in the dbpedia ontology.
I was hoping to use the dbpedia ontology as the taxonomic skeleton
for my next site, but now I'm left with the choice of 'bending' the
dbpedia ontology (I don't feel bad asserting that Manchester is a
dbpedia-owl:City but I do fret about "Tokyo" and "London"...) or
creating my own taxonomy, which is a job I'll screw up as much as the
next guy. Any thoughts?
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