Re: [Dbpedia-discussion] DBpedia 3.2 release, including DBpedia Ontology and RDF links to Freebase

2008/11/18 Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de>

> Hi Hugh and Richard,
>
> interesting discussion indeed.
>
> I think that the basic idea of the Semantic Web is that you reuse existing
> terms or at least provide mappings from your terms to existing ones.
>
> As DBpedia is often used as an interlinking hub between different datasets
> on the Web, it should in my opinion clearly have a type b) ontology using
> Richard's classification.
>
> But what does this mean for WEB ontology languages?
>
> Looking at the current discussion, I feel reassured that if you want to do
> WEB stuff, you should not move beyond RDFS, even aim lower and only use a
> subset of RDFS (basically only rdf:type, rdfs:subClassOf and
> rdfs:subPropertyOf) plus owl:SameAs. Anything beyond this seems to impose
> too tight restrictions, seems to be too complicated even for people with
> fair Semantic Web knowledge, and seems to break immediately when people
> start to set links between different schemata/ontologies.
>
> Dublin Core and FOAF went down this road. And maybe DBpedia should do the
> same (meaning to remove most range and domain restrictions and only keep
> the
> class and property hierarchy).
>
> Can anybody of the ontology folks tell me convincing use cases where the
> current range and domain restrictions are useful?
>
> (Validation does not count as WEB ontology languages are not designed for
> validation and XML schema should be used instead if tight validation is
> required).
>
> If not, I would opt for removing the restrictions.
>
> Cheers
>
> Chris
>

Hi Chris,

I like the idea of going to a less restricted model, particularly as the
people making up the annotations don't always have input into the way
wikipedia does it, unless they are prepared to fight for some changes on
wikipedia in what are sometimes long torn out battles, and still not be
assured that a template or category is never used in a place where the
ontology doesn't fit (particularly for the range and domain constraints).
IMO an ontology to support dbpedia should be in the less restricted class,
if only because of the lack of direct authority or at least the lack of
ability to fix up all of the mistakes in quite a few million articles to fit
what will be a continually changing ontology and source mix.

Any hints as to when the community based infobox extraction interface will
be coming?

Cheers,

Peter