Since Wikipedia is the biggest community edited knowledge platform, I would suggest to bind in articles in wikipedia
as classes in your graph.
Wikipedia itself has already many relationsships between "things" hidden in its links.
Maybe you can create a tool to systematically link these
articles together into hirarchies and general classes.
For the articels in Wikipedia itself, you could propose
a special type of "link" to that graph.
Something like
Dog:
[REL:SUBCLASS:Mammal]
with an explanation of its purpose.