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Here we keep track of modification requests in the DBpedia Ontology
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Why so many Properties defined on owl:Thing Class? #15

Open Louistisserand opened 8 years ago

Louistisserand commented 8 years ago

Hello, I am a new contributor to DBpedia and raise this question that may probably be answered quickly. What is the reason why there are so many Properties defined for owl:Thing base Class (I counted 471 in the list at page http://mappings.dbpedia.org/server/ontology/classes/owl%3AThing) ? My assumption would be to define at owl:Thing level only the Properties that are common to all Classes that will be sub-classes of this root one. Like "name", "comment" ... and the 'Reserved for DBpedia'. If so many attributes are defined (that in fact cannot be valid alltogether for any concrete sub-Class), what are the rules to add or not a Property to owl:Thing ? Should all possible ¨Properties be assigned to this basic class ??? Thanks for your clarifications.

chile12 commented 7 years ago

Hello Louistisserand,

sorry for the late answer: In most of these cases this is due to (too) generic or missing Infobox Templates in the Wikipedia Wiki-text. In these cases a type statement is missing all together and owl:Thing is assumed.

To 'add a property to owl:Thing' , as far as I understand you, is whenever you define a property with no specific rdfs:domain statement, than owl:Thing is assumed as domain.

I hope this helps.