I was wondering if anyone had considered more general query language capabilities in SMW. For example, if we tag geneological relationships in entries (let's use Kings of England rather than Hollywood folks to keep this high level), so that we have Edward IV is [[son of::Richard (Duke of York)]] and Richard III is also [[son of::Richard (Duke of York)]], can we query for who is the brother of Edward IV? Of course we can kludge this by asking for sons of Richard of York and excluding Edward, but that won't help if we want to do something like get a list of all the brothers who were kings of England. In a more general query language this would be acheived by defining a relation "brother" as two people with the same father, and then constructing the desired query.
Another difficulty I've run into is discovering that there is a piece of semantic data which needs to be added to many pages. In the above example, having tagged all the English monarchs as [[title:=King]], we may decide we want to add French monarchs as well. So now we need to add [[country ruled:=England]] to all the existing pages. It would be nice to have an automatic way to do that. Perhaps if we made some attributes heritable, so that if we tag Richard III with [[suceeded::Edward IV]] then Richard III will automagically inherit the property "country ruled." At the risk of making these ramblings too long, let's try another example. In the previous case the mass re-tagging accompanies a major expansion in the purpose of the wiki (English monarchs -> European monarchs). But if we consider something like Wikispecies, then these kinds of shifts might be more common. For example, we might tag the page for mammals with various attributes, such as milk producing, it might inherit the attribute "vertebrate" from the subphylum Vertabrata, but it might not be until we add the platypus, which we will attribute as "egg laying" that we realize that for completness we need to go back and attribute the rest to "live young". In adding species we will probably find new attributes popping up all the time which need to be added to hundreds or thousands of pages. Any ideas? -- Daniel M. Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
