[Wikidata] Re: History of some original Wikidata design decisions?

[Jan Dittrich]

I would be very interested in Wikidatas Relation to Cyc
 on one hand and the semantic Web on the
other.

Jan

Am Fr., 23. Juli 2021 um 01:57 Uhr schrieb Denny Vrandečić <
dvrande...@wikimedia.org>:

> Hi Thad,
>
> Thanks for asking the questions, and thanks Tobi for the pointers. Man,
> what a lengthy post it was.
>
> I understand that the post answered most of your questions. I think that
> it is entirely possible to layer a prototype semantics over Wikidata, just
> as the DL semantics have been layered over it. I don't remember if such
> work has been done before.
>
> Regarding ISO 5964, I think I probably have looked through it at some
> point, but I don't remember it anymore. SKOS has certainly been a stronger
> influence, and obviously OWL.
>
> I hope that helps with the historical deep dive :) Lydia and I really
> should write that book!
>
> Cheers,
> Denny
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 3:00 PM Thad Guidry  wrote:
>
>> *Tobi - *That blog post 3 is very helpful.  It shows that Denny and I
>> think alike and agree on everything. :-)  His dislike for strong
>> classification.
>> Which is part of my basis, to allow weak relations much more.  And use
>> them.  But how to allow them, and I think the only way is through
>> properties based on the Data Model currently.
>> There are many ways, and SKOS is one way to allow expressing weak
>> relations and we already have some good support with existing properties
>> like P4390 mapping relation type 
>> and a host of others.
>>
>> Denny and I also fear the same things, like not having a flexible enough
>> system to describe our complex world that doesn't always fit into strict
>> rules.  Which is kinda why I've always liked
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#secassociative
>> because of it's non-transitivity which allows much flexibility and as he
>> and I would say... avoid "Barbara". :-)
>> Which is pretty much summarized in
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#secadvanced
>>
>> Sorry for all the SKOS links but semantic relations helps to describe
>> human knowledge.  How a system represents or portrays semantic relations is
>> where choices are made or have been made.  *And I think the right
>> choices were definitely made.*
>> Overlaying SKOS and the Wikidata properties that sprinkle it into the
>> data model is useful, but I've always been kind of reluctant to do
>> that...probably for the same reasons Denny might give?  Choices between
>> allowing "semantic accuracy" versus "semantic flexibility".  But I think
>> systems like SKOS provide both.  Perhaps it could be argued that OWL
>> provides much less. :-)  Still all KOSs provide great use when they fit
>> well.  How they can fit over Wikidata, as I said, is probably only through
>> properties at this late stage of design and that's fine with me!
>>
>> Still, my main focus is and always will be trying to add human knowledge
>> about concept relations into Wikidata to help machines, to help us.  (the
>> "edges" that humans quickly can deduce in seconds, but still to this day
>> can sometimes take machines days or weeks to figure out).
>>
>> My usage and help to Abstract Wikipedia and Wikidata later on will
>> primarily be around the mapping of relations ... where a lot of the
>> possibilities have already been described years and years ago at the very
>> bottom of this long page:
>> *inter-KOS mapping relationships  <-- *very last row, 3rd column
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#seccorrespondencesISO
>>
>>
>> *Denny - * were you part of or lightly influenced by ISO 5964 through
>> Germany ISO DIN or not .. that also would be good to know.
>>
>> Thad
>> https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/
>> https://calendly.com/thadguidry/
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 3:17 PM Tobi Gritschacher <
>> tobias.gritschac...@wikimedia.de> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> It would be nice to have a place to look with a link to a page in the
 Community portal that says "History of Wikidata's design and early
 collected meetings, notes, design documents, recordings"

>>>
>>> Might not answer your concrete question, but here are some (very) early
>>> blog posts by Denny. They are still a nice read. :)
>>>
>>> 1/3
>>> https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/02/22/restricting-the-world/
>>>
>>> 2/3
>>> https://newwwblog.wikimedia.de/2013/06/04/on-truths-and-lies/
>>>
>>> 3/3
>>> https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/09/12/a-categorical-imperative/
>>>
>>> Cheers, Tobi
>>> ___
>>> Wikidata mailing list -- wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
>>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikidata-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
>>>
>> ___
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>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikidata-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
>>
> ___
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> To unsubscribe send a

[Wikidata] Re: History of some original Wikidata design decisions?

[Dan Brickley]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 at 11:58, Jan Dittrich 
wrote:

> I would be very interested in Wikidatas Relation to Cyc
>  on one hand and the semantic Web on
> the other.
>

this isn’t written down in one place well, yet

Here is one strand of history, emphasising from Cyc via Guha’s later work
on MCF.

CycL inspired Apple MCF, which got XMLified by Tim Bray when Guha took it
Netscape. June ‘97 it was submitted to W3C by Netscape. It combined with
requirements from W3C content labeling work (PICS), where there was
interest in adding more decentralized expressivity (eg to support Dublin
Core and other schemas being combined in one “label”), complex structures
and datatyped property values, aka Signed PICS labels and PICS-NG. While
PICS and PICS-NG had an s-expression based syntax, RDF (like the 1997
iteration of MCF) went with XML. At the time XML was being invented by
stripping SGML down into something that might suit the Web. Microsoft
submitted XML-Data to W3C mid 97 too (as well as later a revision, breaking
W3C etiquette). XML-Data shared some goals with RDF but not its graph data
model. RDF and other usecases led to XML Namespaces being an important
thing. As XML popularity grew, RDF was under pressure since it didn’t
engage much with the SGML heritage. The RDFS WG launched just after the RDF
Model + Syntax spec was announced at Dublin Core’s conference in Finland.
This being the “browser wars” era both RDF and RDFS were under huge
pressure to be completed quickly. RDFS included a small subset of the
schema-defining machinery from MCF. The RDF M+S WG produced an RDF
recommendation in Feb 1999 but RDFS was left in limbo, in part because the
XML community were wary of being forced to build XML Schema on top of it.
Meanwhile from 1998 a small but enthusiastic community started to build
around RDF - experimenting with query languages, databases, integration
with inference engines, APIs etc., alongside continued support from
Netscape who used the technology heavily for everything from RSS feeds,
sitemaps, “whats related” annotation services, open data (dmoz) dumps, to
their own browser’s internal data source APIs (xul templates, bookmarks,
mail, ..). On the standards track, W3C management backed off from RDF work
to reflect the concerns of its membership, who tended to much prefer XML.
Meanwhile the US military research agency DARPA had been persuaded by an
academic turned staffer (Jim Hendler) who had worked on similar early
technology (SHOE, PIQ) that they should fund research to standardize a
DARPA Agent Markup Language. A DAML / W3C collaboration led to the
RDF-oriented W3C team at MIT receiving DARPA funding to continue the work
area that had not engaged the XML-centric interest of W3C’s membership (ie
Advisory Committee). Alongside this, RDF/S had engaged the interests of
European researchers working around logic-based KR languages, eg f-logic,
description logics etc., resulting in DAML (US) and OIL (description logic
EU research project outcomes) collaborating via adhoc transatlantic
committee to produce DAML+OIL, a first draft of a more complicated language
that sat on top of RDF. The W3C MIT DARPA funding supported a “Semantic Web
Advanced Development” activity that operated in the grey around of W3C’s
“non member-funded activity”, and which served in particular to bring
DAML+OIL into W3C as new work item. This next phase of RDF work at W3C was
broadly in line with the RDF roadmap and expectations from the 1997
Metadata Activity, but rebranded “Semantic Web” to reflect several
considerations. Firstly that RDF was clearly more powerful and expressive
than a simple metadata format might need. Secondly, by this point RDF was
pretty unpopular in several contexts - and seen as draining staff resources
and attention from W3C membership priorities (XML, Web Services, etc.).
Renaming from RDF allowed a fresh start. Calling it Semantic Web tied into
Tim-BL’s interest and writing in the area, had more “visionary” feel,
allowing for a message that it was a longer term investigation, therefore
not a competitor to XML Schema, SOAP, Xquery and so on. So now we had PICS
and MCF having mutated into RDF/S for graph data, and then simultaneously a
rebranding of the exercise as Semantic Web, with a big dose of “futuristic”
and “researchy”. Conferences and journals and such started to appear,
initially with much more focus on the “semantics” part, rather than the
“web”. This was the cause for the second great half-hearted renaming, which
grew from the growing split between those of us who were in this for
web-based data sharing, integration, feeds, sitemaps, rss, foaf etc and so
on, and those who were more “semantics first”, with a passion for finding
efficient subsets of Description Logic. Around the mid-2000s the earlier
experimental RDF query languages solidified into SPARQL, which was broadly
in the “data access” side of the community. This is another place that the
Cyc and MCF heritage 

[Wikidata] Wikidata weekly summary #479

[Mohammed Sadat Abdulai]

*Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over
the last week.*
Events 

   - Next Wikidata and Wikibase office hour
    on July
   28th at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group
   
   - The next Wikibase live session
    is at 16:00 UTC on
   Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca
   Mauri  to give a
   presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
   - 2021 LD4 Conference on Linked Data in Libraries
  - Issues and Challenges in optimum utilization of Linked Data in
  Indian libraries 
  - Tutorial: Introduction to the Wikidata lexicographical data project
  
  - Tutorial: Wikidata: Intro to the Basics
  
  - Tutorial: Writing Data to Wikidata Using Spreadsheets
  
  - Wikibase: Free, Flexible and Collaborative Linked Data
  
  - Rune inscriptions in Wikidata / Wikibase; Sampo Model and Portal
  Series on the Semantic Web
  
  - Wikidata In Classroom • Creating Linked Data from Books and
  Magazines 
  - LD4 meeting: Wikidata Affinity Group
  
   - Introduction to Wikidata (in Indonesian) part 1
   , part 2
   , part 3
   
   - Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group
   

   call: Andra Waagmeester on work with Shape Expressions in Wikidata to
   describe the genomics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; [1]
   
,
   July 27th.
   - COSCUP 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 2020.07.31-08.01 Online website
   、Meta-wiki
   

   - Openstreetmap x Wikidata meetup 2021.08.09 Mozilla Community Space
   Taipei (Q61752245) 

Press, articles, blog posts, videos


   - Blogs
  - Typed Citations in the Journal of Cheminformatics
  

  - What happens in Wikibase when you make a new Item?
  

  - Discovering new comics with Wikidata’s powerful tools
  

  - Two metadata directions. Metadata practice is evolving. I discuss
  two important trends here: entification and pluralization
  
  - Still mapping!  *"Our
  team has been working continuously on improving the number of Welsh place
  names that appear online since our inception in 2017 as partt of
the Welsh
  Government’s Welsh Government #Cymraeg2050 project"..."we will also use
  Wikidata to store and share Welsh language information".*
  - Making the Camino de Santiago visible on Wikidata
  

Tool of the week

   - User:Nikki/LexemeInterwikiLinks.js
    adds
   Wiktionary interwiki links in the sidebar on lexeme pages.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

   - Job opening: Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions is hiring software
   engineers and an engineering manager
   .
   - Job opening: Digital Channels Outreach Manager
   

   ("mentions contributing to Wikidata and Wikimedia platforms")

Did you know?

   - Newest properties
   :
  - General datatypes: Wikimedia Incubator URL
  , symbol represents
  , bridge number
  

[Wikidata] Re: History of some original Wikidata design decisions?

[Samuel Klein]

Wow :)  Thanks for that, Dan!

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 11:43 AM Dan Brickley  wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 at 11:58, Jan Dittrich 
> wrote:
>
>> I would be very interested in Wikidatas Relation to Cyc
>>  on one hand and the semantic Web on
>> the other.
>>
>
> this isn’t written down in one place well, yet
>
> Here is one strand of history, emphasising from Cyc via Guha’s later work
> on MCF.
>
> CycL inspired Apple MCF, which got XMLified by Tim Bray when Guha took it
> Netscape. June ‘97 it was submitted to W3C by Netscape. It combined with
> requirements from W3C content labeling work (PICS), where there was
> interest in adding more decentralized expressivity (eg to support Dublin
> Core and other schemas being combined in one “label”), complex structures
> and datatyped property values, aka Signed PICS labels and PICS-NG. While
> PICS and PICS-NG had an s-expression based syntax, RDF (like the 1997
> iteration of MCF) went with XML. At the time XML was being invented by
> stripping SGML down into something that might suit the Web. Microsoft
> submitted XML-Data to W3C mid 97 too (as well as later a revision, breaking
> W3C etiquette). XML-Data shared some goals with RDF but not its graph data
> model. RDF and other usecases led to XML Namespaces being an important
> thing. As XML popularity grew, RDF was under pressure since it didn’t
> engage much with the SGML heritage. The RDFS WG launched just after the RDF
> Model + Syntax spec was announced at Dublin Core’s conference in Finland.
> This being the “browser wars” era both RDF and RDFS were under huge
> pressure to be completed quickly. RDFS included a small subset of the
> schema-defining machinery from MCF. The RDF M+S WG produced an RDF
> recommendation in Feb 1999 but RDFS was left in limbo, in part because the
> XML community were wary of being forced to build XML Schema on top of it.
> Meanwhile from 1998 a small but enthusiastic community started to build
> around RDF - experimenting with query languages, databases, integration
> with inference engines, APIs etc., alongside continued support from
> Netscape who used the technology heavily for everything from RSS feeds,
> sitemaps, “whats related” annotation services, open data (dmoz) dumps, to
> their own browser’s internal data source APIs (xul templates, bookmarks,
> mail, ..). On the standards track, W3C management backed off from RDF work
> to reflect the concerns of its membership, who tended to much prefer XML.
> Meanwhile the US military research agency DARPA had been persuaded by an
> academic turned staffer (Jim Hendler) who had worked on similar early
> technology (SHOE, PIQ) that they should fund research to standardize a
> DARPA Agent Markup Language. A DAML / W3C collaboration led to the
> RDF-oriented W3C team at MIT receiving DARPA funding to continue the work
> area that had not engaged the XML-centric interest of W3C’s membership (ie
> Advisory Committee). Alongside this, RDF/S had engaged the interests of
> European researchers working around logic-based KR languages, eg f-logic,
> description logics etc., resulting in DAML (US) and OIL (description logic
> EU research project outcomes) collaborating via adhoc transatlantic
> committee to produce DAML+OIL, a first draft of a more complicated language
> that sat on top of RDF. The W3C MIT DARPA funding supported a “Semantic Web
> Advanced Development” activity that operated in the grey around of W3C’s
> “non member-funded activity”, and which served in particular to bring
> DAML+OIL into W3C as new work item. This next phase of RDF work at W3C was
> broadly in line with the RDF roadmap and expectations from the 1997
> Metadata Activity, but rebranded “Semantic Web” to reflect several
> considerations. Firstly that RDF was clearly more powerful and expressive
> than a simple metadata format might need. Secondly, by this point RDF was
> pretty unpopular in several contexts - and seen as draining staff resources
> and attention from W3C membership priorities (XML, Web Services, etc.).
> Renaming from RDF allowed a fresh start. Calling it Semantic Web tied into
> Tim-BL’s interest and writing in the area, had more “visionary” feel,
> allowing for a message that it was a longer term investigation, therefore
> not a competitor to XML Schema, SOAP, Xquery and so on. So now we had PICS
> and MCF having mutated into RDF/S for graph data, and then simultaneously a
> rebranding of the exercise as Semantic Web, with a big dose of “futuristic”
> and “researchy”. Conferences and journals and such started to appear,
> initially with much more focus on the “semantics” part, rather than the
> “web”. This was the cause for the second great half-hearted renaming, which
> grew from the growing split between those of us who were in this for
> web-based data sharing, integration, feeds, sitemaps, rss, foaf etc and so
> on, and those who were more “semantics first”, with a passion for finding
> efficient su

[Wikidata] Re: History of some original Wikidata design decisions?

[David McDonell]

Seconded!!

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 12:47 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Wow :)  Thanks for that, Dan!
>
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 11:43 AM Dan Brickley  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 at 11:58, Jan Dittrich 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I would be very interested in Wikidatas Relation to Cyc
>>>  on one hand and the semantic Web on
>>> the other.
>>>
>>
>> this isn’t written down in one place well, yet
>>
>> Here is one strand of history, emphasising from Cyc via Guha’s later work
>> on MCF.
>>
>> CycL inspired Apple MCF, which got XMLified by Tim Bray when Guha took it
>> Netscape. June ‘97 it was submitted to W3C by Netscape. It combined with
>> requirements from W3C content labeling work (PICS), where there was
>> interest in adding more decentralized expressivity (eg to support Dublin
>> Core and other schemas being combined in one “label”), complex structures
>> and datatyped property values, aka Signed PICS labels and PICS-NG. While
>> PICS and PICS-NG had an s-expression based syntax, RDF (like the 1997
>> iteration of MCF) went with XML. At the time XML was being invented by
>> stripping SGML down into something that might suit the Web. Microsoft
>> submitted XML-Data to W3C mid 97 too (as well as later a revision, breaking
>> W3C etiquette). XML-Data shared some goals with RDF but not its graph data
>> model. RDF and other usecases led to XML Namespaces being an important
>> thing. As XML popularity grew, RDF was under pressure since it didn’t
>> engage much with the SGML heritage. The RDFS WG launched just after the RDF
>> Model + Syntax spec was announced at Dublin Core’s conference in Finland.
>> This being the “browser wars” era both RDF and RDFS were under huge
>> pressure to be completed quickly. RDFS included a small subset of the
>> schema-defining machinery from MCF. The RDF M+S WG produced an RDF
>> recommendation in Feb 1999 but RDFS was left in limbo, in part because the
>> XML community were wary of being forced to build XML Schema on top of it.
>> Meanwhile from 1998 a small but enthusiastic community started to build
>> around RDF - experimenting with query languages, databases, integration
>> with inference engines, APIs etc., alongside continued support from
>> Netscape who used the technology heavily for everything from RSS feeds,
>> sitemaps, “whats related” annotation services, open data (dmoz) dumps, to
>> their own browser’s internal data source APIs (xul templates, bookmarks,
>> mail, ..). On the standards track, W3C management backed off from RDF work
>> to reflect the concerns of its membership, who tended to much prefer XML.
>> Meanwhile the US military research agency DARPA had been persuaded by an
>> academic turned staffer (Jim Hendler) who had worked on similar early
>> technology (SHOE, PIQ) that they should fund research to standardize a
>> DARPA Agent Markup Language. A DAML / W3C collaboration led to the
>> RDF-oriented W3C team at MIT receiving DARPA funding to continue the work
>> area that had not engaged the XML-centric interest of W3C’s membership (ie
>> Advisory Committee). Alongside this, RDF/S had engaged the interests of
>> European researchers working around logic-based KR languages, eg f-logic,
>> description logics etc., resulting in DAML (US) and OIL (description logic
>> EU research project outcomes) collaborating via adhoc transatlantic
>> committee to produce DAML+OIL, a first draft of a more complicated language
>> that sat on top of RDF. The W3C MIT DARPA funding supported a “Semantic Web
>> Advanced Development” activity that operated in the grey around of W3C’s
>> “non member-funded activity”, and which served in particular to bring
>> DAML+OIL into W3C as new work item. This next phase of RDF work at W3C was
>> broadly in line with the RDF roadmap and expectations from the 1997
>> Metadata Activity, but rebranded “Semantic Web” to reflect several
>> considerations. Firstly that RDF was clearly more powerful and expressive
>> than a simple metadata format might need. Secondly, by this point RDF was
>> pretty unpopular in several contexts - and seen as draining staff resources
>> and attention from W3C membership priorities (XML, Web Services, etc.).
>> Renaming from RDF allowed a fresh start. Calling it Semantic Web tied into
>> Tim-BL’s interest and writing in the area, had more “visionary” feel,
>> allowing for a message that it was a longer term investigation, therefore
>> not a competitor to XML Schema, SOAP, Xquery and so on. So now we had PICS
>> and MCF having mutated into RDF/S for graph data, and then simultaneously a
>> rebranding of the exercise as Semantic Web, with a big dose of “futuristic”
>> and “researchy”. Conferences and journals and such started to appear,
>> initially with much more focus on the “semantics” part, rather than the
>> “web”. This was the cause for the second great half-hearted renaming, which
>> grew from the growing split between those of us who were in this for
>> web-based data sh