Am 07.05.2013 14:01, schrieb emw:
"Yes, there is and should be more than one "ontology", and that is
already the case with categories, which are so flexible they can loop
around and become their own grandfather."

Can someone give an example of where it would be useful to have a cycle in an ontology?

Navigation! How else are you going to find back where you came from ;)
Wikipieda categories were invented originally for navigation, right? Cycles are not soo bad, then...
Now we live in a new era.
-- Sebastian


To my knowledge cycles are considered a problem in categorization, and would be a problem in a large-scaled ontology-based classification system as well. My impression has been that Wikidata's ontology would be a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with a single root at entity <http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120> (thing).


On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <psychosl...@culture-libre.org <mailto:psychosl...@culture-libre.org>> wrote:

    Le 2013-05-06 18:13, Jane Darnell a écrit :

        Yes, there is and should be more than one "ontology", and that is
        already the case with categories, which are so flexible they
        can loop
        around and become their own grandfather.


    To my mind, categories indeed feet better how we think. I'm not
    sure "grandfather" is a canonical term in such a graph, I think
    it's simply a cycle[1].

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_%28graph_theory%29


        Dbpedia complaints should be discussed on that list, I am not a
        dbpedia user, though I think it's a useful project to have around.


    Sorry I didn't want to make off topic messages, nor sound
    complaining. I just wanted to give my feedback, hopefuly a
    constructive one, on a message posted on this list. I transfered
    my message to dbpedia mailing list.



        Sent from my iPad

        On May 6, 2013, at 12:00 PM, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt
        <j...@sahnwaldt.de <mailto:j...@sahnwaldt.de>> wrote:

            Hi Mathieu,

            I think the DBpedia mailing list is a better place for
            discussing the
            DBpedia ontology:
            https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
            Drop us a message if you have questions or concerns. I'm
            sure someone
            will answer your questions. I am not an ontology expert,
            so I'll just
            leave it at that.

            JC

            On 6 May 2013 11:01, Mathieu Stumpf
            <psychosl...@culture-libre.org
            <mailto:psychosl...@culture-libre.org>> wrote:

                Le 2013-05-06 00:09, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt a écrit :

                    On 5 May 2013 20:48, Mathieu Stumpf
                    <psychosl...@culture-libre.org
                    <mailto:psychosl...@culture-libre.org>> 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.


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--
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Events: NLP & DBpedia 2013 (http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org, Deadline: *July 8th*)
Venha para a Alemanha como PhD: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/csf
Projects: http://nlp2rdf.org , http://linguistics.okfn.org , http://dbpedia.org/Wiktionary , http://dbpedia.org
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
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