work on analyzing or improving the Wikidata ontology

Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page) is a large (close 
to 110 million entities) open-source repository of information. Wikidata uses 
a data model that is similar to, but more general than that of either RDF or 
labelled property graphs. Wikidata incorporates a large ontology using regular 
properties, as does RDFS.

The Wikidata ontology has become very large, somewhere around 4 million 
class-like entities. As for the rest of Wikidata, the Wikidata ontology is the 
result of edits from many different sources and by many different agents. As a 
result, there are many problems in the ontology.

There have been several investigations and surveys about the Wikidata ontology 
and thus an increased awareness of the problems in the ontology.   See 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Ontology_issues_prioritization, 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Ontology_issues_prioritization#Overview_of_potential_solutions, 
and 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikidata_Challenges_in_Semantic_Web_Community.pdf 
for more information.  There is a task force starting up to address issues in 
the Wikidata ontology.  See
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ontology/Cleaning_Task_Force 
for more information.

If you are interested in analysis of the Wikidata ontology or in helping to 
improve the ontology please contact me. Any kind of interest is welcome, 
ranging from theoretical analyses of the ontology, to techniques for reasoning 
in Wikidata, to implementation of tools that help improve the ontology, to 
direct editing of the ontology. I can assist you in finding out more about the 
ontology, introducing you to others involved with the ontology, forming groups 
that can address issues with the ontology, or developing a topic suitable for 
academic investigation.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider

Received on Thursday, 4 January 2024 15:33:38 UTC