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Yes, this. Well, in this case, the solution is obvious: you need to have two separate concepts for center. But… When I first learned about the OmegaWiki projec
by mormegil 6y ago
Yes, this. Well, in this case, the solution is obvious: you need to have two separate concepts for center. But…
When I first learned about the OmegaWiki project (called WiktionaryZ then, I think), I was thrilled. It tried to represent lexical (Wiktionary) definitions and other language concepts using data. For each sense of each word, a so called DefinedMeaning was created. In the same sense, Wikidata has its entities. But soon, I learned about a problematic aspect of OmegaWiki’s concept, and the same thing appears on Wikidata: You represent some set of concepts in a single language, then another language comes and needs to split some concepts in two, because your language uses one word for both, but the other differentiates between them. Then, a third language comes and it maps its concepts to your existing set still a bit differently, so you might get four entities for just three languages. Etc.
On Wikidata, more focus is, I guess, on “concrete” entities: people, places, etc., where this does not appear that often. But it contains the abstract entities as well, and the problem appears there all the time. You might try to “fix” the problematic entities by splitting them to more elementary, linked using “subclass of” etc.; in some cases it might work quite fine (but losing the interwiki links in the process, which is unfortunate, given those were the original use case of Wikidata), in others, it is basically impossible without a degree in philosophy and deep understanding of ten languages, to be able to correctly distinguish and represent their relations. And imagine somebody trying to _use_ those entities. Like “I would like to say this person was a writer”, but there are seventeen entities with the English label of “writer”, distinguished by some obscure difference used by a group of Sino-Tibetan languages.
And… Wikidata entities represent basically just nouns.
So… I am a bit sceptical.
- Luk3 6y agoI believe that Wikidata's Lexeme system is trying to fix that, is it not?