On 9 May 2007, at 19:40, Yaron Koren wrote:
> I think one of
> the big strengths of SMW is that it's a relatively simple concept -
> there's only one way to declare a relation or attribute, and there's
> only one place (that is, one page) where you can store any specific
> relation or attribute.
I completely agree that this simplicitly is an important design
principle, as wikis are supposed to be as easy as possible.
However, I'm still struggling with the problems posed by symmetric
relations, and by pairs of inverse relations. In both cases, the same
link (semantically speaking) can be added in two different places,
actually duplicating information (which I think is unwanted) and
making it more difficult for inline queries to find the information
For example, on the Amterdam page, one could say:
[[capital of::Netherlands]]
And likewise, on the Netherlands page, one could state:
[[has capital::Amsterdam]]
The information content of the two links is identical. SMW should
ideally find such alternatives in inline queries, thus showing users
that a particular piece of information is already present in the wiki
(though on a different page than they might have envisioned it).
The basic idea would be, for example, to declare on the page
{{Relation:capital of}} that it [[has inverse:has capital]]. This
then should automatically lead to broaden the search of an inline
query like:
<ask>[[has capital::{{PAGENAME}}]]</ask>
to also do the inverse question:
<ask>{{PAGENAME}} [[capital of::*]]</ask>
and merge the results into one table.
best
michael
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