Hi David,
How does your treatise relate to the fact that
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q153 has statements that entail the
following? [1]
ethanol
*instance of* chemical compound
*subclass of* chemical compound
How would it resolve that specific problem?
Such statements make Wikidata incompatible with ChEBI and other major
ontologies, like Gene Ontology and Disease Ontology, which use *instance of*
(i.e. rdf:type, P31) and *subclass of* (i.e. rdfs:subClassOf, P279, is_a)
as recommended in the Relation Ontology (RO) [2] and the Basic Formal
Ontology (BFO).
For Wikidata to be interoperable with other major ontologies in the
Semantic Web, we cannot "scrap everything and start again from the
beginning". We must stand on the shoulders of giants. Doing away with
"entity" [3] as a the top of the *subclass of* hierarchy and introducing a
raft of idiosyncratic ontological constructs like "identifiables",
"cognizables", "negentropy" and "system survival-oriented direction" to
Wikidata is probably not the way to go.
Regarding your concerns about the ability of existing approaches to
represent emergent properties and natural language, I recommend perusing
[4], an influential paper that informs DOLCE and BFO -- particularly the
section on "The Role of Identity Criteria". I also highly recommend
lectures 3 and 1 in
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/IntroOntology_Course.html for gaining a
perspective on how BFO maintainers think about things like distinguishing
objects and representations, and that upper ontology's philosophical
roots. Given your interest in phenomenology and Husserl, you may also be
interested in what BFO maintainers have written on those subjects in e.g.
[5] with regard to ontology.
Best,
Eric
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q153 currently states "ethanol *subclass
of* alcohol", but given "alcohol *subclass of* organic compound" and
"organic compound *subclass of* chemical compound", it is entailed that
"ethanol *subclass of* chemical compound".
[2] Barry Smith et al. (2005). *Relations in Biomedical Ontologies*.
http://genomebiology.com/2005/6/5/r46
[3] "Entity" item on Wikidata. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120.
Mapped to owl:Thing.
[4] Nicola Guarino (1998). *Some Ontological Principles for Designing Upper
Level Lexical Resources*. http://arxiv.org/pdf/cmp-lg/9809002v1
[5] Barry Smith (1989). *Husserl: Logic and Formal Ontology*.
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/lfo.html
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