-------- Message original -------- Objet: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories. Date: 2013-05-06 11:01 De: Mathieu Stumpf <[email protected]> À: <[email protected]>
Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit : > On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Le dimanche 05 mai 2013 à 16:28 +0200, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a >>> The ontology is maintained by a community that everyone can join at >>> http://mappings.dbpedia.org/ . An overview of the current class >>> hierarchy is here: >>> http://mappings.dbpedia.org/server/ontology/classes/ . You're more >>> than welcome to help! I think talk pages are not used enough on the >>> mappings wiki, so if you have ideas, misgivings or questions about >>> the >>> DBpedia ontology, the place to go is probably the mailing list: >>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion >> >> Do you maintain several "ontologies" in parallel? Otherwise, how do >> you >> plane to avoid a "cultural bias", and how do you think it may impact >> the >> other projects? I mean, if you try to establish "one semantic >> hierarchy >> to rule them all", couldn't it arise cultural diversity concerns? > > We maintain only one version of the ontology. We have a pretty > diverse > community, so I hope the editors will take care of that. So far, the > ontology does have a Western bias though, more or less like the > English Wikipedia or the current list of Wikidata properties. > > JC I can't see how your community could take care of it when they have no choice but not contribute at all or contribute to one ontology whose structure already defined main axes. To my mind, it's a structural bias, you can't go out of it without going out of the structure. As far as I understand, the current "ontology"[1] you are using is a tree with a central root, and not a DAG or any other graph. In my humble opinion, if you need a central element/leaf, it should be precisely "ontology"/representation, under which one may build several world representation networks, and even more relations between this networks which would represent how one may links concepts of different cultures. To my mind the problem is much more important than with a local Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects). Because each project can expose subjects through the collective representation of this local community. But with wikidata central role, isn't there a risk of "short-circuit" this local expressions? Also, what is your metric to measure a community diversity? I don't want to be pessimist, nor to look like I blame the current wikidata community, but it doesn't seems evident to me that it currently represent human diversity. I think that there are probably a lot of economical/social/educational/etc barriers that may seems like nothing to anyone already involved in the wikidata community, but which are gigantic for those non-part-of-the-community people. Now to give my own opinion of the representation/ontology you are building, I would say that it's based on exactly the opposite premisses I would use. Wikidata Q1 is universe, then you have earth, life, death and human, and it seems to me that the ontology you are building have the same anthropocentrist bias of the universe. To my mind, should I peak a central concept to begin with, I would not take universe, but perception, because perceptions are what is given to you before you even have a concept for it. Even within solipsism you can't deny perceptions (at least as long as the solipcist pretend to exist, but if she doesn't, who care about the opinion of a non-existing person :P). Well I wouldn't want to flood this list with epistemological concerns, but it just to say that even for a someone like me that you may probably categorise as western-minded, this "ontology" looks like the opposite of my personal opinion on the matter. I don't say that I am right and the rest of the community is wrong. I say that I doubt that you can build an ontology which would fit every cultural represantions into a tree of concepts. But maybe it's not your goal in the first place, so you may explain me what is your goal then. [1] I use quotes because it's seems to me that what most IT people call an ontology, is what I would call a representation. -- Association Culture-Libre http://www.culture-libre.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
