2025-10-31 –, One and Only
The Wikidata ontology is large, multi-domain, and community-created. This results in a considerable number of issues, such as ambiguous classes and questionable subclass relationships, disjointness violations, confusion between subclass and instance, and different modeling decisions in different domains, that undermine reliability and limit or impair use of the ontology. Less attention has been paid to finding and fixing these issues than adding new classes and domains. Improving the Wikidata ontology will take a combination of better tools to help in finding and fixing existing issues, better tools to help editors avoid creating issues, and a change in the community to promote better ontology design. This need not be done solely in a top-down rigid fashion but should instead include creation adoption of coherent, well-described ontoological principles that gain acceptance through use. The goal is not perfection, but an ontology sufficiently cohesive and consistent to enable robust inferencing and use in applications.
This session will present a vision of the Wikidata community participating in a collaborative effort to repair and strengthen Wikidata's Ontology. In a 25-minute presentation followed by 20 minutes of open discusson, we will talk about what issues we see in the Wikidata ontology, what can be done to remedy these issues, and how to get more editors involved in improving the Wikidata ontology, and what actions need to be taken to make these efforts successful.
Our goal is to start building a stronger culture of analysis within the community: one that detects, documents, and systematically addresses issues in the Wikidata ontology. This includes both automated and human-guided fixes, supported by clearer validation tools, edit warnings, and well-described representation principles.
With many changes to Wikidata coming, especially the opportunities and risks created by federation, we want to discuss the long term strategy of shaping a more consistent and robust Wikidata ontology that can better support the use of Wikidata, particularly in applications that touch many domains.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider is in the post-economic phase of his research career. Peter's research interests center on large-scale representation of knowledge and information. He has made long-term contributions to description and ontology logics, particularly the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language. He developed large portions of OWL and its predecessor DAML+OIL, as well as SWRL, the Semantic Web Rule Language, and RDF, the W3C language for representing data in the Semantic Web. Peter is currently working on finding and fixing issues in the Wikidata Ontology and benchmarking SPARQL engines on Wikidata.
All relevant info about me can be found here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Egezort