I did a quick analysis of the classes in the DBpedia ontology and found
quite a few issues that I think need attention.

-  Many classes have no instances.  Each of these empty classes
   should be examined to see whether they should be removed or modified.

-  The sports-related groupings are differentially populated, differentially
   organized, and unaxiomatized.  These groupings should be regularized and
   minimal axiomatizations provided for them.  For example, there would be
   classes for Basketball under at least SportsLeague, SportsTeam, Coach,
   and SportsEvent each defined as the restriction of the grouping elements
   related to Basketball.  The sports groupings include Sport (which is
   special), SportsLeague, SportsTeam, Athlete, Coach, SportsTeamMember,
   SportsManager, SportsEvent, SportFacility, SportCompetitionResult,
   SportsSeason, and Tournament.

-  Numerous stated inclusion relationships are not correct when considering
   the normal definition of the class names.  Each of these should be
   examined and either descriptions of the classes that support the
   inclusion relationship be provided or the relationship itself modified.
   For example, instances of the RecordOffice class do not appear to be
   non-profit organizations.  Some other examples of questionable or
   outright incorrect subclasses here are TermOfOffice, BackScene,
   ChessPlayer, PokerPlayer, TeamMember, Saint, FictionalCharacter,
   MythologicalFigure, OrganisationMember, Religious, Baronet, Medician,
   Professor, Embryology, Lymph, Constellation, Galaxy, ElectionDiagram,
   Olympics, OlympicEvent, ControlledDesignationOfOriginWine,
   PublicServiceInput, PublicServiceOutput, and ProgrammingLanguage.

-  Some class relationships are missing.  For example, TeamMember is
   unrelated to SportsTeamMember even though they are both supposed to be
   members of athletic teams.  Some other examples of missing relationships
   are between BullFighter and Bullfighter, between Host and TelevisionHost,
   and between Comic and Comics.  The missing relationships should be
   provided or the classes merged.

-  Place is a rather unnatural union.  It should either be removed or
   better organized.

-  There are quite a few subclasses of Building that are not truely
   buildings, including AmusementParkAttraction, Casino, Factory, Hotel,
   MilitaryStructure, Abbey and the other religious places of worship,
   Restaurant, ShoppingMall, and Venue.  Similarly, there are a number of
   subclasses of ArchitecturalStructure that may not be architectural
   structures, including Garden, PublicTransitSystem, and Park.  There are a
   few subclasses of NaturalPlace that are not necessarily natural
   places, including Canal, and even Lake.   These classes should be
   moved up in the ontology.

-  The subclasses of Species are not collections of species.  The
   subclasses should either be modified or moved elsewhere in the
   ontology.

-  The normal definition of PopulatedPlace is much too narrow to encompass
   all its subclasses.  A new general class should be created to
   encompass the subclasses and PopulatedPlace be modified as necessary.

- There are a number of strange top-level or second-level classes.  These
   classes should be examined to ensure that they make sense.  Many of
   these classes appear to be somehow related to measurements, including
   Altitude, Area, Blazon, ChartsPlacement, Demographics, Depth,
   GrossDomesticProduct, GrossDomesticProductPerCapita,
   HumanDevelopmentIndex, Population, Sales, Statistics, and Tax.  Other
   strange classes include LifeCycleEvent, Imdb, Listen, PenaltyShootOut,
   PersonFunction, PoliticalFunction, Profession, TopicalConcept, Type, and
   YearInSpaceflight. 

Even if I had editing rights to the ontology I think that the fixes I have
outlined above go beyond what should be done without some discussion.

Comments?

peter


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Put Bad Developers to Shame
Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration
Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment 
Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees
_______________________________________________
Dbpedia-discussion mailing list
Dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion

Reply via email to