Hi Wikidata people,

We have started to widen our collection of various historical people with 
various memberships on our wikibase installation - FactGrid, a "database for 
historians" (which should eventually become a source for Wikidata).

This is a typical dataset on a person: 
https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/Item:Q84
This one is more complex: https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/Item:Q1319

I am wondering whether it was clever to put the individual membership in a 
lodge (or several lodges) under a wider umbrella of "member of Freemasons". How 
for instance can we now ask our query service for a list of all Freemasons plus 
individual lodge affiliation.

Question: Is it good to create such subplots with qualifiers? Is it good to do 
this in the light of the SPARQL queries we want to run? Is it good with a 
perspective on the additions we could perhaps better add if we avoided such 
subclauses? - like dates of membership in different lodges? (That seems to be a 
problem right now...)

We have far more details of membership information (like functions in these 
societies) and I feel we can find very different arrangements like

* create qualifiers for a particular membership (member of the Illuminati plus 
50 qualifiers of details information...
* create minute and specialised properties for each sort of organisation which 
are then offered on one level (a property for membership in the Illuminati, 
particular property for the person who proposed the new member, a property for 
the date of entry, a property for the first grade, a new property for grade 2 
and so on... 
* create a branch of new items for membership information sorted by 
organisation - something like a membership card for any individual membership 
in any sort of association. A person who is member of the Illuminati would then 
get a new item for his particular membership with different entries on who 
brought him into the order? When accepted, when promoted to which level? where 
affiliated? What internal positions...

See this blog entry for details we have on any particular Illuminati 
membership: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/47

What kind of mess would we create with membership-items in future SPARQL 
queries? I feel dizzy with these questions.  

How would you organise such things if you were aiming at a kind of animation, 
where we will eventually see how the Illuminati infiltrated lodges? 

These are peculiar questions. We could need some advice from people who can 
already foresee the SPARQL calamities we are creating with these first data 
sets - and the difficulties we are creating for Wikidata as a future user of 
our research data. So maybe you can help us with good advice on how to best 
organise our weird knowledge.

Best,
Olaf




Dr. Olaf Simons
Forschungszentrum Gotha der Universität Erfurt
Schloss Friedenstein, Pagenhaus
99867 Gotha

Büro: +49-361-737-1722
Mobil: +49-179-5196880

Privat: Hauptmarkt 17b/ 99867 Gotha

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