| Yes, there's also 'instance of' (P31) [1]. Together, 'instance of', 'subclass of' and 'part of' comprise Wikidata's basic membership properties [2]. 'Instance of' and 'subclass of' provide Wikidata with a way to express the basic philosophical notion of type-token distinction [3]. For things that are a subclass of something like 'material entity', all instances are physical objects that have a unique location in space and time. Not all instances are spatiotemporal particulars, though. For example, one might say "Homo sapiens instance of taxon", where taxon is a metaclass, i.e. a class in which the instances are classes. (Here 'taxon' would not be a subclass of 'material entity' -- i.e. taxa are information artifacts, not physical objects.) Support for this kind of "punning" via metamodeling is a major feature of OWL 2 DL [4]. If this sort of thing interests you, definitely take a look into Wikidata [5]. The project will be a sea change for several key features in Wikipedia (e.g. infoboxes), and will likely be a main hub of the Semantic Web. --- 1. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P31 2. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Basic_membership_properti... 3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/ 4. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/ 5. https://www.wikidata.org |
I'm familiar with OWL and RDF. I've been using Sparql and DBPedia, I'll switch to Sparql and Wikidata if you think that's the way to go. How do you see the overlap between DBPedia and Wikidata?
I'm concerned that there's going to be knowledge-grab by corporations and (perhaps) government entities. I fear that the knowledge graphs inside the big G and FB and Yandex and Apple and MS and so on to power their search engines and personal assistants will be orders of magnitude more sophisticated and complex and comprehensive that what will be available to open access research. Witness Freebase. Are my fears misplaced would you say?
I've read that SEP article, I've also read a good bit of Peirce's original journal article. As it says in SEP "It should be mentioned that for Peirce there is actually a trichotomy among types, tokens and tones,[...]" - I think it's amusing that basically everybody ignores the triadic distinction that Peirce claimed to be the case for a dualistic type/term distinction.
I'm looking forward to going through your tutorial quill in hand and pot of ink at the ready.