Hi Gerard,

I think we should not aim for a "perfect" system, just for "a better one".
In our case we don't need to reproduce all cases, just identify the most
relevant ones and to clarify when to use each and label/describe them
clearly.

"Part of" is understood, but in so many possible ways that its meaning gets
diluted into uselessness.

Thanks,
Micru



On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 9:50 PM, Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hoi,
>
> I fear that when words like mereology are expected to be understood, we
> will fall into the trap where our communities fear what we have been
> sniffing. It will just alienate them.
>
> Part of is something that is understood. There may be academic reasons
> that make sense to the people who care about them. The question I think we
> should take serious is if that is really where we want to go.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
>
> On 10 June 2014 20:21, David Cuenca <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I think we should drop "part of" and start using a better mereological
>> system
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology#Various_systems
>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/image1.png
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Micru
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 8:05 PM, Joe Filceolaire <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Even where there is complete agreement that a human settlement is a
>>> 'city' there is still usually a question over the population of that city.
>>> The question is down to what to include.
>>>
>>> A city in many cases is understood to include the contiguous built up
>>> area but this will often extend far beyond the original administrative
>>> region that bears the name. So we have the "City of London" (the central
>>> business district, corresponding to the medieval and Roman city), "Greater
>>> London" (The collection of contiguous urban boroughs that area part of the
>>> Greater London administrative entity - ironically this does not include the
>>> "City of London" but does include the "City of Westminster"), all the built
>>> up areas out to the "Metropolitan green belt" (includes bits of every
>>> county adjacent to Greater London), or all areas within commuting distance
>>> of Central London (with the train services this includes a lot of area and
>>> it is getting bigger as faster trains are deployed).
>>>
>>> When do two cities become one? London and Westminster? Buda and Pest?
>>> Minneapolis and St Paul? Dallas and Fort Worth? Kansas MI and Kansas KA?
>>> Dusseldorf, Essen and Dortmund? Detroit and Windsor?
>>>
>>> Joe
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray <[email protected]
>>> > wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 10 June 2014 09:20, Markus Krötzsch <[email protected]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > The class "city" is used for "relatively large and permanent human
>>>> > settlement[s]" [1], which does not say much (because the vagueness of
>>>> > "relatively"). Maybe we should even wonder if "city" is a good class
>>>> to use
>>>> > in Wikidata. Saying that something has been awarded city status in
>>>> the UK
>>>> > (Q1867820) has a clear meaning. Saying that something is a "human
>>>> > settlement" is also rather clear. But drawing the line between
>>>> "village",
>>>> > "city" and "town" is quite tricky, and will probably never be done
>>>> uniformly
>>>> > across the data.
>>>> >
>>>> > Conclusion: if you are looking for, say, human settlements with more
>>>> than
>>>> > 100k inhabitants, then you should be searching for just that (which I
>>>> think
>>>> > is basically what you also are saying below :-).
>>>>
>>>> OSM has had a lot of problems with this as well, I think - labelling
>>>> something as a "city" is one of those very slippery terms that
>>>> everyone thinks is obvious but never quite agrees on what the obvious
>>>> bit is :-)
>>>>
>>>> I wonder if we should think about how best to make sure people know
>>>> this. Perhaps there is a role for the "human-readable" pages to have
>>>> disambiguation-type notes on them? "If you are aiming to do a search
>>>> based on "instances of 'city'", we recommend you try "instances of
>>>> 'human settlement'" instead..."
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> - Andrew Gray
>>>>   [email protected]
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Etiamsi omnes, ego non
>>
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