On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Paul Houle <[email protected]> wrote: > 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! >
One of the advantages of using SMW over the present category structure would be to end the continual argumentation about what sorts of cross-categories are acceptable---in particular, to use the example of people, whether they should be categorized by ethnicity - profession intersections, e.g., American Jewish athletes. Unimaginable rancour arises from such discussions--see WP:Categories for Discussion at the enWP for examples. At present they decision of whether or not to make a category is decided by the vague concept of presumed usefulness together with the inapplicable one of political correctness; there would be much to be gained by letting the user combine anything they might happen to want on the fly rather than have these pre-determined. -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
