Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wikidata Mereology Task Force (ID: 23435223)
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Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Egezort
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Wikidata Mereology Task Force
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2025-08-31 - 2025-10-27
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
Turkey
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Not applicable
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
Wikidata has thousands of properties. A handful among these, such as instance of (P31), subclass of (P279), are very important and vital in the inner consistency and usefulness of Wikidata. There has been limited but substantive work done on making these make logical sense. However, with the “has part(s)” property (P527), very little (if any) work has been done. This results in the conflation of many different relationships given through one property, only really reflecting usage in natural language, and nothing else in purely logical terms.
Here’s a small list of different uses of “has part(s)”.
1- Physical part (ie. the human body has part arm) 2- Creative work part (ie. “Do you hear the people sing” (a song) is part of “Les Miserables” (a musical)). 3- Event part of bigger event. (ie. The Battle of Kursk is a part of World War 2.) 4- Temporal unit (ie. Monday is a part of week.) 5- Organisational/Structural part (ie. Wikimedia has part Wikidata)
There is also an important distinction of class/class vs individual/individual relations.
- My arm is part of my body.
- An arm is part of a body.
This may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s very important. One reflects a current situation between distinct things. It might change if my arm gets cut off. The second one reflects a general situation between two classes, and will not change based on what happens to my arm.
All of the examples given above are represented on Wikidata with one property. This creates many issues, one is that it hinders our ability to use this for inferencing. A physical part relationship is transitive. (For example: Forest has part tree, tree has part branch, branch has part leaf, leaf has part petiole, all hold true transitively, ie. “forest has part petiole” can be inferenced.) But other relationships are not necessarily transitive.
If this relationship was split, we would have a much more useful knowledge graph at hand, which has many positive implications. (Such as increased use in LLM’s, helping us have more human control over AI.)
We want to initiate an effort to analyze the use of part-of and related properties in Wikidata and specialize it into several well-defined subproperties, each with a specific purpose and behaviour. This will take place through the formation of a task force that will meet regularly and discuss these issues, create a proposal to update part-of relationships, and start a collective effort to implement the proposal.
There are currently more than 2.5 million usages of this property. Of course it’s not feasible to go through them one by one, but it is possible to analyze the use of this property using queries and other means to produce some idea on what the current relationship might mean. If the relationship is between two physical objects, the “has part(s)” relationship is probably (but not definitely) a “has physical part(s)” relationship.
We will invite participation in the task force, with some members driving the analysis and others mostly performing as observers and commentators. The meetings will be open for everyone to join, but in case the participation is too high, we may keep the other observers only as spectators, and keep the discussions only within the full members of the task force. Everyone is obviously welcome to join the discussion in text in the Telegram group and on Wikidata discussions, this limitation would only be for the meetings.
The group also assumes the responsibility to put forward property proposals. Since this process requires community consensus, we cannot commit to any of the proposals to be accepted, but we do commit to addressing community concerns about our proposals and to make changes if better methods are proposed. There have been previous efforts similar to ours aimed at addressing structural issues in Wikidata, but they were often limited in scope and reach. One notable example is the deprecation of the “of” property (P642). While the effort has been successful according to us, a similar effort can achieve significantly more if it has a dedicated team and a funded project behind it. To support the efforts of the task force we are asking for support for a facilitator and researcher who will act on behalf of the task force, setting up communications and performing other administrative tasks, fleshing out the ideas brought forward in task force meetings, and driving the production of the group’s proposal. Administrative tasks will include extensive community engagement, management of Telegram groups, and the organization of online meetings. We want to have the initial proposal from the task force done by the end of the support timeframe. We realize that implementation of the proposal is very unlikely to be done during this time, but once an initial proposal is done the task force will continue and we will continue to be part of its efforts to update and implement the proposal.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
The funded part of the project is planned to last 8 weeks. We will do different amounts of the activities given below:
- Online meetings: Likely once a week, but spontaneous meetings can take place between members
- Constant discussions in a Telegram group
- Little presentations in order to introduce concepts to each other
- At least 2 full presentations to be presented to the entire Wikidata community. (Perhaps in a Wikidata conference type thing if there is one)
We will document everything under the Mereology Task Force page under the Wikidata:Wikiproject Ontology page. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ontology/Mereology_Task_Force
Example to-do list for the group, supported by the facilitator/researcher:
- Come up with queries to classify current relationships
- Find properties to mark as subproperty or superproperty of “has part(s)”
- Tackle the 551 has part(s) loops https://qlever.cs.uni-freiburg.de/wikidata/sIzMey
- Propose new properties
- Discuss and put forth logical ramifications of the property
- Come up with usage examples for the new properties
This project will take place in a relatively short time. The applications for the Task Force will start in mid-August, when the decision for the grant is announced, and meetings will start in early September and end in the end of October. We believe that a concerted and intensive effort is much more likely to motivate people than a long-winded project. But, in case we fail to meet some core goals by the middle of October, we will postpone the end date, as long as necessary. (But it will have been completed by late January at the latest).
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
Ege Atacan Doğan is a Graduate in Computer Science and has been a Wikimedian for 4 years. He was a cohort of the Organiser Labs course from 2023. He has conducted many Wikimedia workshops in university functions and elsewhere. He was one of the co-leads (with Peter) of the recently completed Wikidata Ontology Course. He will be performing most of the supported activities.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider is a long-time researcher in knowledge representation with special interests in knowledge graphs, ontologies, and Wikidata. Has been editing Wikidata for nearly 10 years. Earlier publications and presentations on Wikidata include https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03900 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Barriers_to_Using_Wikidata_as_a_Knowledge_Base.pdf
We have co-authored two papers about problems in the Wikidata ontology: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15550 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13707
We started a group to address problems in the Wikidata ontology that meets regularly to discuss possible fixes to the Wikidata ontology.
Ege’s supported activities will include will include the following:
- Creating an introductory plan for the aims of the project (ie. a draft of the proposed “has part(s)” relations)
- Leading the meetings of the Task Force.
- Finalising and publishing the notes taken during the meeting (notes will be taken collaboratively)
- Administrating the Telegram group
- Managing to-do lists (reflected in the list given in the “changes we’re trying to bring” section) for the issues that need to be tackled collectively
- Taking part in the discussion of property proposals
Peter will be responsible for the following:
- Advising the task force on ontology and mereology modeling
- Participating as a core member of the task force (unfunded)
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
Task force core members: We aim to form a dedicated group, ourselves included, comprising individuals who have demonstrated expertise in Wikidata. Members will be expected to actively follow discussions, participate in regular meetings, and take primary responsibility for specific subject areas (to be assigned collaboratively and based on strengths).
Task force observers: This role is open to anyone interested in following the project. Observers can join discussions, provide feedback, and contribute informally, without the responsibilities assigned to core members. We welcome anyone curious about Wikidata ontology work to participate in this way.
This project is narrow in scope in relation with the general skills of the participants. So the primary aim is not to retain them as the Mereology Task Force, but to introduce them as active members to Wikiproject Ontology. This is similar to our approach in our previous project. The following engagement will be primarily through the Wikiproject Ontology Telegram Group.
The Mereology Task Force can stay as a semi-active effort after this project and be active in times of significant relevance.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
Two weeks before the submission, we sent a Telegram message to the Wikidata Telegram Group, and the Wikiproject Ontology Telegram group. The message is:
We—Ege Atacan Doğan and Peter F. Patel-Schneider—are looking for dedicated contributors to help improve the “has part(s)” property on Wikidata.
As we wrap up the Wikidata Ontology Course, our next initiative is to launch a Mereology Task Force—a focused effort to tackle part-whole relationships in Wikidata (mereology is the philosophical study of parts and wholes). We plan to apply for a Rapid Grant in this cycle to support the project.
We’re seeking:
6 core members who will commit to regular meetings, engage in in-depth discussions, and take on responsibility for rigorous analysis of relevant properties.
Observers and contributors who can participate in discussions and contribute more flexibly, without the full commitment required of core members.
Are you someone who enjoys philosophical deep dives? Does the idea of tracing the universe from atoms through has part statements excite you? Do you want to be part of this exploration?
Then stay tuned!
If the funding is approved, we’ll be opening applications in August for both core members and observers. In the meantime, feel free to reach out with ideas, questions, or other ways you'd like to contribute.
We have created a draft page on the Wikiproject Ontology page.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ontology/Mereology_Task_Force
We have talked about this task force in our weekly Wikiproject Ontology Cleaning Task Force meeting. There are a few people who have already expressed interest in participating in this project.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Innovate in Free Knowledge
Learning and metrics
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
-Can we tackle a big problem with the concerted effort of a small group of people?
- Will the community be up for radical changes, in case the proposals are prepared very carefully?
- Are qualifiers a good way to make these distinctions, or should the properties be split?
- What creative ways can we come up with to make Wikidata consistent and useful?
- Will the changes we make result in a big effect in what can be inferred?
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 20 | This includes the amount of people who will take part in our discussions in one way or another, and may join for some of the meetings. For the presentations made to the Wikidata community, the number may be much bigger. |
| Number of editors | 8 | This is the number of people who will be full members of the task force and actively do edits and documentation. |
| Number of organizers | 2 | Ege and Peter will be the organisers of this project |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
N/A
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
Yes
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| New properties or widely used qualifiers | We aim to split up has part(s) into distinct categories. This could be with qualifiers or with new properties. We aim for 7. | 7 |
| Statements clarified | We aim to clarify the meaning of some statements so that what the part of relationship is telling us is understandable. We are going to do most of these through querying and finding items that fit a pattern. | 10000 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
Wikidata Query Service and Qlever mostly. Manual counting and documentation on Spreadsheets for some things.
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TNMpn4Qr-GnGfuqPuohBVb5ZIhXA6fkP8J3yVXW1ZCs/edit?usp=sharing
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
3150 EUR
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
3705 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).