Hi,
My counsel is to not let DBpedia's mission stray into questions of
conceptual "truth". Keep the ontology flat and simple with no
aspirations other than "just the facts, ma'am".
I would not necessarily state it this way as the quality and the
expressibility of a large ontology such as the DBpedia ontology are key,
but I share your feeling about keeping this an information science
ontology instead of a philosophical ontology that aims at answering
questions about what exists in 'reality'. Information science ontologies
should aim at making these differences explicit, not at defining
'truth'. I would also be very careful not to develop this into any sort
of 'top-level' ontology or use a pre-fixed alignment to a particular
ontology. Generally, I hope a new DBpedia ontology would be following
the principle of minimal ontological commitments and may be even
developed based on ontology design patterns.
Best,
Krzysztof
On 02/25/2015 09:19 PM, Mike Bergman wrote:
Hi John,
My thoughts are for DBpedia to stay close to the mission of extracting
quality data from Wikipedia, and no more. That quality extraction is
an essential grease to the linked data ecosystem, and of much major
benefit to anyone needful of broadly useful structured data.
I think both Wikipedia and DBpedia have shown that crowdsourced entity
information and data works beautifully, but the ontologies or
knowledge graphs (category structures) that emerge from these effort
are mush.
DBpedia, or schema.org from that standpoint, should not be concerned
so much about coherent schema, computable knowledge graphs,
ontological defensibility, or any such T-Box considerations. They have
demonstrably shown themselves to not be strong in these suits.
No one hears the term "folksonomy" any more because all initial
admirers have seen no crowd-sourced schema to really work (from dmoz
to Freebase). A schema is not something to be universally consented,
but a framework by which to understand a given domain. Yet the
conundrum is, to organize anything globally, some form of conceptual
agreement about a top-level schema is required.
Look to what DBpedia now does strongly: extract vetted structured data
from Wikipedia for broader consumption on the Web of data.
My counsel is to not let DBpedia's mission stray into questions of
conceptual "truth". Keep the ontology flat and simple with no
aspirations other than "just the facts, ma'am".
Thanks, Mike
On 2/25/2015 10:33 PM, M. Aaron Bossert wrote:
John,
You make a good point...but are we talking about a complete tear-down
of the existing ontology? I'm not necessarily opposed to that
notion, by want to make sure that we are all in agreement as to the
scope of work, as it were.
What would be the implications of a complete redo? Would the benefit
outweigh the impact to the community? I would assume that there
would be a ripple effect across all other LOD datasets that map to
dbpedia, correct? Or am I grossly overstating/misunderstanding how
interconnected the ontology is?
Vladimir, your thoughts?
Aaron
On Feb 25, 2015, at 21:14, John Flynn <[email protected]> wrote:
It seems the first level effort should be a requirements analysis
for the
Dbpedia ontology.
- What is the level of expressiveness needed in the ontology
language- 1st
order logic, some level of descriptive logic, or a less expressive
language?
- Based on the above, what specific ontology implementation language
should
be used?
- Should the Dbpedia ontology leverage an existing upper ontology,
such as
SUMO, DOLCE, etc?
- Should the Dbpedia ontology architecture consist of a basic common
core of
concepts (possibly in addition to the concepts in a upper ontology)
that are
then extended by additional domain ontologies?
- How will the Dbpedia ontology be managed?
- What are the hosting requirements for access loads on the
ontology? How
many simultaneous users?
This is only a cursory cut at Dbpedia ontology requirement issues.
But, it
seems the community needs to come to grips with this issue before
implementing specific changes to the existing ontology.
John Flynn
http://semanticsimulations.com
-----Original Message-----
From: M. Aaron Bossert [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 9:13 AM
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: dbpedia-ontology; Linked Data community; SW-forum;
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Dbpedia-ontology] [Dbpedia-discussion] Advancing the
DBpedia
ontology
Vladimir,
I'm thinking of trying to do some stats on the existing ontology and
the
mappings to see where there is room for improvement. I'm tied up
this week
with a couple deadlines that I seem to moving towards at greater
than light
speed, though my progress is not.
As soon as I get the rough cut done, I'll share the results with you
and
maybe we can discuss paths forward?
I'm with you on the 30% error rate...that doesn't help anyone.
Aaron
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Webpage: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~jano/
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