Many thanks for the explanations Markus!
I still feel uneasy about the hard-to-remember-neonym. I cannot prove
it, but believe the term snak will have to be learned by anyone who
interacts with the system through the API, any form of import
mechanism, etc. This is far wider than the developers in the sense of
coders. I may be wrong here.
I guess you have considered broadening the concept of statement. Why
does this not work? My feeling is that it is a statement that a
property is not applicable ("has not value"). Naively speaking, such a
statement does require a source and in many respects is similar to
other forms of statements.
Gregor
On 5 April 2012 21:04, Markus Krötzsch <mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
> 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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