You can browse the DBpedia ontology classes online. Under owl:Thing
, there are a number of toplevel classes. While it's not a perfect match, because it includes some collective entities, it looks like the Agent class and its complement probably correspond fairly well to animate and inanimate objects. You might also need to consider the Animal class as well, or some other things under the Species class. There are also some non-DBpedia classes, e.g., foaf:Person that you should probably consider, too. At any rate, the big approach here would be to select what classes in that hierarchy you consider to represent animate and inanimate things, and then use that to decide about instances.
E.g., you could use a query like this to find animate things (if we define animate things as Agents and Animals):
select ?x where {
?x a owl:Thing
filter exists {
?x a ?type .
filter( ?type in ( dbpedia-owl:Agent, dbpedia-owl:Animal ) )
}
}
limit 100