Re: DBpedia as possible project

On 02/11/10 10:14, Patrick Durusau wrote:
> Lars,
>
> I decided to at least poke around in the top level classes of DBpedia,
> at: http://mappings.dbpedia.org/server/ontology/classes
>
> This could be fun.
>
> Did you know that PlayboyPlaymate is a top level class? Right next to
> Philosopher? Who knew?
>
> BTW, if you look at "Properties on PlayboyPlaymate:"
>
> You find what you expect, bustSize, hipSize, waistSize, but also:
>
> anthem?, boiling point?, dateOfAbandonment?, highestPosition?,
> lowestPosition?, militaryBranch? (is that a preference?) mouthPlace?...,
> and it just goes on.
>
> When I got to timeInSpace, I realized that not every property was
> probably filled in for a PlayboyPlaymate.

Hi Patrick,

The project that I described in Montreal at Balisage 2008 was
essentially DBPedia implemented in Topic Maps over JSPWiki. It
generated an XTM snapshots of the current wiki on demand as a
web service. That project was sadly killed by a new director
who thereafter resigned (he was not particularly effective),
but there were some lessons learned.

One of the things I find disturbing about the quick jump from
source availability to modeling is the very typical disregard
for semantics in favour of inferring suitability based on a
term or predicate's label, often without even bothering to read
the documentation (when that even exists). This is exemplified
in the common misuse of 'equals', 'same as', 'equivalence',
'identity', mixing and matching concepts from different and
often incompatible sources, mistaking human statements for
logical relations, opinions for facts, category errors, etc.
I could write a book about these errors; they are legion.
Reading about zip codes and such only reminds me of this. E.g.,
has anyone once mentioned the need for something akin to a
"topographical ontology", a "political boundaries ontology",
or a "temporal ontology" as the basis for making assertions
about politically-determined territories that change over
time? No. That's great for experiments, but we're still
operating in the realm of toys.

I would hardly expect that a resource such as Wikipedia, created
and edited over a long period of time by an international community
of non-experts using no controlled vocabularies (in mind of the
actual definition of that term) would yield reasonable triples
(using 'reasonable' in any formal sense). That DBPedia makes some
very strange inferences about Playboy bunnies is hardly surprising
in this environment. Even at the very beginning its definition of
"class" is problematic.

The most important part of my cancelled project was not the
mapping of an existing content base into a wiki capable of
being harvested as a Topic Map (that would be analogous to the
current flap over the subject that started this thread), it was
the attempt at merging a formal library classification system
with the user-generated informal statements on the wiki -- made
without regard to any controlled vocabulary (e.g., almost
everything on Wikipedia/DBPedia). That was also the basic subject
of my doctoral research.

To adopt Lars' choice of words, I would submit that the use of an
uncontrolled, "informal ontology" for purposes of machine reasoning
would be almost completely useless, and potentially harmful.
Entertaining, perhaps, but very poorly suited except as a hint to
humans as to what *might* be true: any inference and interpretation
of statements would still require human intervention. I.e., one
might use this for Playboy bunnies but not for air traffic control
(or NASA space flights).

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

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