On 5/10/2011 5:48 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> One thing that I would like to do in Wikipedia is:
>
> A category that spans a scale, e.g. people by date
> of birth. Today we use [[Category:1823 births]] to
> group people born in that year, where the category
> page has links to the previous and next year, and
> possibly to supercategories by decade or century.
This gets to one of the big missing pieces of the semantic web, in
my mind. I call them parametrized categories.
Let :L be some topic in DBpedia, and assume it's not one of the 1%
or so bogus topics like "List of X"
If there is :L, then there's also a category which is
:Books_About(:L) and if :P is a person, then there is
:People_Who_Dated(:P). Then there are categories like
:Metals_That_Melt_Between(1000C,1000C) and of course Union(:C1,:C2),
Intersection(:C1,:C2)
It's all very nice but at some point you want to be reasoning about
things rather than materializing zillions of categories that somebody
might care about. Take a look at the bottom of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
if you want to see the agony of Wikipedia categories. I mean, yikes!
Why is one thing there and not another thing?
Once we've made the sin of materializing
Intersection(c:American,c:Actor,c:Politician) why don't we also
materialize Intersection(c:Actor,c:Politician,c:Athlete) and all the
other combinations of the attributes that :Arnold_Schwarzenegger has?
What's particularly infuriating is that the categories are a badly
denormalized rats nest. Is there some robot that goes around making
sure that people who have a birth date in 1947 get listed in
:1947_births and not in :1948_births? Wouldn't it make more sense to
just code the birth date in a controlled manner and generate the birth
year 'categories' on the fly?
And don't get me started on how the categories don't tile
together. A few years back I wanted to make a list of automotive
nameplates (c:Toyota_Corolla, c:Chevy_Mailbu) but there's no category
that these all are in. You might find c:Models_of_Toyota_Cars, and
c:Front_Wheel_Drive_Cars and
c:Cars_That_From_A_Long_Distance_Look_Like_Flies and you need to merge
these together and still edit out things that don't belong.) What a mess!
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