Gregor, James, I don't know if you are familiar with OWL and other
semantic web standards, but if you are then the following explanation
might be useful for you:
The most precise general term for Snak in Semantic Web speak would be
"axiom". The term "assertion" is more specific, since an assertion in
ontology languages is an axiom that expresses instance-level information
about individuals and literals. You may also have heard of the related
terminology "ABox" that is used in description logics, again referring
to instance-level knowledge. Snaks, in contrast, could also express some
schema level statements, so calling them assertions would be misleading
for people who are familiar with OWL and similar languages.
On the other hand, "axiom" would also be a poor choice of name. For one
thing, it is not certain that all Snaks will have an easy reading as OWL
axioms, and there are certainly many OWL axioms that cannot be written
as Snaks. Moreover, the word "axiom" already has a variety of meanings
in other contexts, none of which is what we mean here. Since Snaks are a
purely technical construct in Wikidata that will mainly be seen by
developers, we have thus given them a name that does not suggest
anything specific.
Markus
On 05/04/12 04:51, James HK wrote:
Hi,
When I glanced over the data model description and found the word
'Snaks' [1] as entity or unit of facts, it created some interpretive
confusion. Semantic web already uses some abstract language to
describe entity concepts, if possible don't introduce another one just
to describe a new concept and if necessary please choose a descriptor
that is more self-explanatory.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Data_model#Snaks
Cheers
On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Gregor Hagedorn<g.m.haged...@gmail.com> wrote:
Would the Word "assertion" be a possible replacement for the neonym "Snak"?
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