On 19.12.2012 18:00, Gregor Hagedorn wrote: > Yes, Wikidata shall store a normalized version of the value, but it > also needs to store an original one. Whether it needs to store the > value twice I am not sure, I believe not. If it store the original > prefix, original unit and original significant digits, it can > generally recreate the original form. I know that there are some > pitfalls with IEEE numbers in this, and it may be safer to store the > original number as well initially (and perhaps drop it later when > enough data are available to test the effects).
I was trying to avoid storing the original input value and unit, but perhaps that was a bad idea. Wikidata will have to store such values twice anyway: once as structured data in the primary data record, and once as an index value. The index value has to be normalized and "dumb" - we can't put structure there, it's going to be a single value, possibly augmented by some kind of accuracy indicator. The index value needs to have a form that can be easily sorted, compared, indexed and queried by a wide variety of database systems. The value we store in the primary data record however can be as complex as we need it, and can be in any unit we like. The rendering of a value will be based on the primary data record, to the conversion and rendering logic has access to all the additional information it may want to use. -- daniel -- Daniel Kinzler, Softwarearchitekt Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
