Re: DBpedia as possible project

I agree with Murray's concerns about (all-too-common) modelling abuses: for
example (and I'm sorry for picking on Lars and this example but it's a good
bad one), an astronaut is not a specialised class of person - it is a role
type played by a person type - and when badly modelled, leads to screw-ups
and false inferences later on: what happens when the person is doing
something other than being an astronaut (being a Playmate for example?)? or
is no longer an astronaut? Roles help give context to people's relationship
with others and the world.

I disgress, but Topic Maps explicitly models roles in a way that other
standards do not - and the topic map community really needs to play to its
own strengths - such as the quality of its underlying model and intellectual
rigour in weeding out poor modelling approaches.

There have been several comments over the last couple of weeks about the
"added value" of topic-mapping" this or that and my 0.01 worth would be to
suggest that we pick a project/domain/hobby that can:
- highlight, make use of and enforce good modelling practices (such as
tackling the above example);
- allow valuable searches and deductions to be made on datasets from better
modelled information territories as a result.

I picked on the role example above because, in every discussion that I have
had with businesses and government agencies over the years, this issue has
come up, largely because of dB admins trying to force square pegs in round
holes and (ab)using class specializations as a way to tackle, for example,
job and functional roles, relationships, etc. There is consistently an "aha"
moment - people get it. And we should be agents to move that sort of
understanding forward.

It might be an interesting thread on this forum to identify what could be
the "unique selling point" of TM vs other standards and identify *from that*
what would be a suitable starting point...

All the best,
Peter

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Transforming Business with technology, Standards and Interoperability
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-----Original Message-----
From: topicmapmail-bounces-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
[mailto:topicmapmail-bounces-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Murray Altheim
Sent: Monday, 01 November, 2010 15:16
To: topicmapmail-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
Subject: Re: [topicmapmail] 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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       Inexhaustible heaven and earth - the light beyond light,
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