Hi,

The Wikidata's ontology is a mess, and I do not see how it could be otherwise. While the creation of new properties is controlled, any fool can decide that a woman is no longer a human or is part of family. Maybe I'm a fool too? I wanted to remove the claim that a ship is an instance of "ship type" because it produces weird circular inferences in my application; but maybe that makes sense to someone else.

There will never be a universal ontology on which everyone agrees. I wonder (sorry to think aloud) if Wikidata should not rather facilitate the use of external classifications. Many external ids are knowledge organization systems (ontologies, thesauri, classifications ...) I dream of a simple query that could search, in Wikidata, "all elements of the same class as 'poodle' according to the classification of imagenet.

On Fri, 28 Sep 2018 at 04:42, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:
James,

It looks like a lot of that phabricator issue was around Taxons ?  For the Poodle to show a class of Mammal...

Seems like many of these could be answered if someone responded to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Danyaljj on their last question about if an "OR" could be used with linktype with gas:service ... where no one gave an answer to their final question comment here:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query/Archive/2017/01#Timeout_when_finding_distance_between_two_entities

I tried myself to answer that question and find either Parent Taxon OR Subclass of a Poodle, but couldn't seem to pull it off using gas:service and 1 hour of trial and error in many forms, even duplicating the program twice ...

http://tinyurl.com/yb7wfpwh

#defaultView:Graph
PREFIX gas: <http://www.bigdata.com/rdf/gas#>

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel
WHERE {
  SERVICE gas:service {
    gas:program gas:gasClass "com.bigdata.rdf.graph.analytics.SSSP" ;
                gas:in wd:Q38904 ;
                gas:traversalDirection "Forward" ;
                gas:out ?item ;
                gas:out1 ?depth ;
                gas:maxIterations 10 ;
                gas:linkType wdt:P279 .
  }
  SERVICE gas:service {
    gas:program gas:gasClass "com.bigdata.rdf.graph.analytics.SSSP" ;
                gas:in wd:Q38904 ;
                gas:traversalDirection "Forward" ;
                gas:out ?item ;
                gas:out1 ?depth ;
                gas:maxIterations 10 ;
                gas:linkType wdt:P171 .
  }

  SERVICE wikibase:label {bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en" }
}


On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 5:24 PM Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi!

> Apparently the Wikidata hierarchies were simply too complicated, too
> unpredictable, and too arbitrary and inconsistent in their design across
> different subject areas to be readily assimilated (before one even
> starts on the density of bugs and glitches that then undermine them).

The main problem is that there is no standard way (or even defined small
number of ways) to get the hierarchy that is relevant for "depicts" from
current Wikidata data. It may even be that for a specific type or class
the hierarchy is well defined, but the sheer number of different ways it
is done in different areas is overwhelming and ill-suited for automatic
processing. Of course things like "is "cat" a common name of an animal
or a taxon and which one of these will be used in depicts" adds
complexity too.

One way of solving it is to create a special hierarchy for "depicts"
purposes that would serve this particular use case. Another way is to
amend existing hierarchies and meta-hierarchies so that there would be
an algorithmic way of navigating them in a common case. This is
something that would be nice to hear about from people that are
experienced in ontology creation and maintenance.

> to be chosen that then need to be applied consistently?  Is this
> something the community can do, or is some more active direction going
> to need to be applied?

I think this is very much something that the community can do.

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@wikimedia.org

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata