Re: DBpedia as possible project

Hi Murray,

I pretty much agree with your statements.
[...]

> being harvested as a Topic Map (that would be analogous to the
> current flap over the subject that started this thread), it was

There is no "flap", I am just disappointed by the fact that the
initial topic map hides a lot of information and is (IMO) not very
mappish (beside the fact that we can query the topic map for
"regions"). Further, the mapping is not transparent: Benjamin Bock
said: "We took garbage, we generated garbage". I'd be interested how
they generated the garbage.

[...]
> 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.

I also agree with that statement. If you try to translate a source
into Topic Maps/RDF you should have some kind of knowledge about that
particular domain.

I don't eat the argument that WikiLeaks is garbage. And I don't eat
the argument that every topic map is a Good Thing. Steve Pepper's
Opera topic map tells us more about Topic Maps than the Afghanistan
Diary War topic map in its current state. That's all I wanted to say.

Best regards,
Lars
-- 
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