Talk:Ontology

Splitting Duchy and Realm Properties

I think that it is important that we split [[Part of:: ]] into two separate properties. in the initial implementation it signifies being part of both a realm and a duchy. The problem is that sometimes we only want things that are part of a realm, and other times part of a duchy. Also, the system gets confused when the realm name is the same as the duchy name. i.e. if I want to find the regions of the Duchy of Perdan, I get all the regions of the realm of Perdan. Therefore, I propose splitting [[Part of:: ]] into two separate properties, as follows:

Property	Meaning	Type	Example Uses / Notes
Property:part of	parent/child relations between regions and realms	page	Used to note on region pages which realm they belong to, for example: [[part of::Sirion]] denotes that the region is part of the realm of Sirion. This should be used in all the region infobox templates.
Property:duchy of	parent/child relations between regions and duchies	page	Used to note on region pages which duchy they belong to, for example: [[duchy of::Sirion]] denotes that the region is part of the duchy of Sirion city. This should be used in all the region infobox templates.

While it would be nice to be able to use something like "part of" in the purest sense to denote that something is part of something else, I don't think we can do that. So long as multiple things can have the same name (religions, realms, guilds, regions, etc.) we won't be able to run sufficiently specific queries on the data.

This problem shows up in this template: Template:Regions of. Example: User:Indirik/Scratch, the Duchy of Perdan lists all of the regions that are part of the realm of Perdan. Thee are other implementations that could be used in pages for regions, and for duchies, that would run into the same problem.

Some discussion here: Template talk:Regions of and here: User talk:Indirik/Scratch.

--Indirik (talk), Editor (talk) 16:03, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

New Property for use by Newspapers

Seeing some new possibilities in Semantic Forms, I think I see some interesting ways to run some newspapers, or personal blogs on the wiki. In order to do that, we need some way to query the date that a page was written. Semantic queries let you search by category and property, and order the results by property. But you can't order results based on the last edit date, or creation date, or anything like that. To create a truly dynamic system that shows the last X articles, without having to constantly edit pages to manually move content around, we need to be able to query dates on articles, and order them by that date. So I would like to propose some new properties that could be used by newspapers to help this. I'll add new properties here as I think about them.

Property	Meaning	Type	Example Uses / Notes
publication date	date on which an article was written	date	To be used to select the most recent articles in a newspaper, and to order them by date for display.
summary	short summary of the article	string	Provides a short summary that can be returned in response to a semantic query.
author	the one who wrote the article	string	Lists author for use in semantic queries