Wikidata:WikidataCon 2017/Notes/The Pleasure of Ontologies: balancing perfection and usability

Abstract

I spoke several times of the pleasure of creating a "working" ontology for a subject. I want to talk both about this pleasure (which, in all Wikimedia projects, can only exists on the Wikidata one and is a big part of Wikidata attraction for me), and of the questions that have arisen these last years around ontologies. Most of us are not ontologies specialists, we are creating them "manually", even sometimes in a "quick and dirty" way. It can be very different from the way other semantic projects constructed their ontologies and I want to talk about the gains and drawbacks of either perfect ontologies able to handle very complex cases, and more organic ones, maybe easier to understand and use but with all the difficulties to handle not-so-easy items. We should, as a project, define what we expect from our ontologies and to do that, we need to have a better understanding of what we are doing.