Hi,
Well, again, this is only my opinion, but to use your example, if I were
designing that wiki about cities, I'd probably create a category called
"Cities", that held every page that was a city, and one called "City
information" that held pages that were on the topic of cities in general.
Or, depending on what else was in the wiki, maybe a category called just
"Information" instead, with information pages about cities having a semantic
tag like "Has topic::Cities". That way, the class-defining nature of
categories would be preserved, without creating ambiguity.
And, of course, the alternative provided for categories in Wikipedia (other
than the basic ones) would be semantic properties.
-Yaron
On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Jon Lang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Yaron Koren wrote:
> > What's up, Dataweaver,
> >
> > The topic *has* been discussed before, but it's still an interesting
> one,
> > and apparently it hasn't been discussed enough because there still
> doesn't
> > seem to be consensus on the issue. :) That quote in the documentation is
> > interesting - I hadn't seen it before. I personally think it should be
> > updated to indicate that this is a description of the way things
> *currently
> > are*, not at all a recommendation - I believe that categories should
> only
> > ever be used to indicate class. Otherwise, as you note, the current
> system
> > would need a variety of changes to be able to differentiate the one kind
> of
> > category from the other.
>
> Well, that's the beauty of extensions: those who like what they do can
> install them, and everyone else can ignore them. :)
>
> FWIW, I _do_ see your point; and in certain highly technical
> environments, I even agree with it, as I indicated in my first
> message. But I don't think that it's so compelling of a point that
> everyone should be forced to adopt it; there is something to be said
> for Category:City including articles about cities in general as well
> as articles about individual cities; and mandating that articles must
> describe instances of the categories that they belong to necessarily
> forbids the former.
>
> Likewise, another possible solution (that I personally don't like)
> would be to have two category namespaces: one for
> categories-as-classes, and another for categories-as-related-topics.
> So [[Class:City]] could then be used to collect all articles about
> individual cities, while [[Category:City]] could be used to collect
> all other articles about city-related topics. Or [[Category:City]]
> could be used for the former purpose, and some other namespace could
> be used for the latter; but I personally think that if you _mean_
> "this is a class", you should _say_ "this is a class", instead of
> co-opting "category" for that purpose.
>
> I don't like this solution because it's getting too rigid for my
> liking. The semantic wiki is not a conceptual subset of the ontology:
> ontologies exist to describe things and to reason about them, while
> semantic wikis exist to document them - thus the reason why articles
> and their OWL/RDF exports are given separate URIs (the document is not
> the thing that it documents), and also the reason why it's OK that not
> every possible relation that can be expressed in an ontology can be
> expressed in a semantic wiki.
>
> And this is the reason why the concept of "Category" shouldn't be
> replaced with the concept of "Class".
>
> Mind you, I can see the benefit of not having "articles about cities
> in general" mixed in with "articles about individual cities", probably
> the biggest selling point of separate namespaces. If my proposal were
> to be accepted, I'd also want the index of a Category page to be
> grouped by the type: so Category:City would list the articles about
> individual cities first, followed by the articles about cities in
> general, in the same manner that it already separates the
> subcategories from the articles.
>
> > And if Wikipedia ever does adopt SMW, I would look forward to a mass
> > deletion of categories over the span of, say, several weeks. :)
>
> O_o
>
> Given the size of Wikipedia, I expect that several months would be
> needed, minimum; and given the nature of the contributor base, I
> suspect that an ongoing battle would have to be fought to ensure that
> Catogories never again get "misused" (by your definition) - especially
> if no alternative is provided.
>
> --
> Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
>
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