> I'd invite you to look at ontologies as nothing more than representations of things we know in some text-based format.
That's because we know how to interpret the concepts used in these representations, in relation to each other. It's just a syntactic change.
You might have a point if it's used as a kind of search engine: "show me wikipedia articles where X causes Y?" (although there is at least one source besides wikipedia, but you get my drift).
> Aside from my point above - haven't looked at the source data, but I doubt it stops at that level.
It does. It isn't even a triple, it's a pair: (cause, effect). There's no other relation than "causes". And if I skimmed the article correctly, they just take noun phrases and slap an underscore between the words and call it a concept. There's no meaning attached to the labels.
But the higher-order causations you mention are going to be pretty useless if there's no way on how to interpret them. It'll only work for highly specialized, unambiguous concepts, like myxomatosis (which is akin to encoding knowledge in the labels themselves), and the broad nature of many of the concepts will lead to quickly decaying usefulness when the length of the path increases. Here are some random examples (length 4 and 8, no posterior selection) from their "precision" set (197k pairs):
['mistake', 'deaths', 'riots', 'violence']
['higher_operating_income', 'increase_in_operating_income', 'increase_in_net_income', 'increase']
['mail_delivery', 'delays', 'decline_in_revenue', 'decrease']
['wastewater', 'environmental_problems', 'problems', 'treatment']
['sensor', 'alarm', 'alarm', 'alarm']
['thatch', 'problems', 'cost_overruns', 'project_delays']
['smoking_pot', 'lung_cancer', 'shortness_of_breath', 'conditions']
['older_medications', 'side_effects', 'physical_damage', 'loss']
['less_fat', 'weight_loss', 'death', 'uncertainties']
['diesel_particles', 'cancer', 'damages', 'injuries']
['malfunction_in_the_heating_unit', 'fire', 'fire_damage', 'claims']
['drug-resistant_malaria', 'deaths', 'violence', 'extreme_poverty']
['fairness_in_circumstances', 'stress', 'backache', 'aching_muscles']
['curved_spine', 'back_pain', 'difficulties', 'stress', 'difficulties', 'delay', 'problem', 'serious_complications']
['obama', 'high_gas_prices', 'recession', 'hardship', 'happiness', 'success', 'promotions', 'bonuses']
['financial_devastation', 'bankruptcy', 'stigma', 'homelessness', 'health_problems', 'deaths', 'pain', 'quality_of_life']
['methylmercury', 'neurological_damage', 'seizures', 'changes', 'crisis', 'growth', 'problems', 'birth_defects']
This one is cherry-picked, but I found it to funny to omit:
['agnosticism', 'despair', 'feelings', 'aggression', 'action', 'riot', 'arrest', 'embarrassment', 'problems', 'black_holes']