Well, not really. Relationships and attributes and properties only serve to
compound the confusion of SMW, which really only needs
ONE (1) "relationship", a "property" (which, I've read, will replace
"relationships" and "attributes" in SMW 1.0). Everything can be
represented by a single link (whatever you want to call it) between things.
MediaWiki categories serve that purpose but are a pain
to add to every page because of the need to type out "category:" all the time
and manually apply all the categorical relationships
between things ("Pages that do this", "Pages that do this to that", "Pages in
location", "Pages in location that do this", "Pages in
location that do this but not that", etc). SMW tries to compensate for this but
just makes "extended categorization" more confusing
and unnecessarily complicated. Hopefully, with with the single "property" link,
SMW will become more easier to use and more
user-friendly, but I still need to actually read the proposal--I only briefly
saw it mentioned somewhere (probably on
http://wntoworld.org) and Yaron mentioned it recently in a Semantic Forms
mailing list post regarding version .5's support for a
semantic "property".
From: "Alex Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 2:02 PM
> I'm sure I don't know anything about the maths of all this, but isn't
> the obvious solution to have SMW use *something else* to represent
> it's isa relationship (e.g. [[Isa::Thing]], and leave Category to
> perform its original purpose in a wiki?
>
> The primary advantage of using Category is that it's familiar, and
> people may have already used it in an isa-like way, at least some of
> the time, meaning you can upgrade an existing wiki to a semantic wiki
> and have it do some work straight away. Once people have got the
> hang of this, attributes, relationships and a more formal ontology
> (I'm just throwing buzzwords around here) would hopefully improve the
> wiki to the point where the semantic metadata becomes something
> really valuable.
>
> However, you could reach this point without hijacking the category
> mechanism, and thereby depriving people of its more general properties.
>
>
> On 9 Aug 2007, at 18:34, Uschold, Michael F wrote:
>
>> Yes, that is an obvious solution. The tradeoff is that you now
>> don't get to say the relationship is hierarchical and get
>> transitive inference, like you get with Category.
>>
>> As others have said, there is a real need for other transitive
>> relations that can give back the functionality we had with
>> Category, but that was taken away from us in SMW because of its
>> restricted use constraints.
>>
>>
>> From: Yaron Koren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 5:49 AM
>>
>> The obvious solution is to use semantic tags for this information -
>> a relation or attribute like "Covers topic" could work nicely; you
>> could then have as many of these as you wanted on a page.
>>
>>
>> On 8/8/07, Uschold, Michael F <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> If one restricts usage of Category in the SMW to get the right
>> semantics of instance and subclass, then it cannot be used for
>> other things that one uses Category for in MW to put things into
>> 'buckets'.
>>
>> Say there is a discussion about two different classes (chimpanzees
>> and gorillas). In the MW, you would just put the page into the
>> chimpanzee and gorilla categories, and it would mean that this page
>> was about these two topics. But if I do that in SMW, it will think
>> that this comparison page is an instance of both chimpanzee and
>> gorilla, which is wrong.
>>
>> I could create a parallel class hierarchy and create categories
>> called PageAboutTopicChimpanzee and PageAboutTopicGorilla and this
>> page would correctly be interpreted as an instance of these
>> categories. I would also have to re-create each sub-category link too.
>>
>> This would work, but means you have to manually keep the two
>> hierarchies in synch, which is not ideal.
>>
>> What is the recommended way to put pages into 'buckets' in SMW?
>>
>> Is this discussed somewhere already?
>>
>> I welcome your thoughts.
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