4 ms·
It appears that Wikidata semantic network statements are untyped and binary rather than n-ary. Ugh. Amazingly, the above URL has a picture which shows exactly
by SeanLuke 5y ago
It appears that Wikidata semantic network statements are untyped and binary rather than n-ary. Ugh. Amazingly, the above URL has a picture which shows exactly why this is such a stupid approach. The location of San Francisco(Q62) is a "Geolocation" consisting of a latitude and a longitude. That is, the statement is (if I'm reading this right):
location(San Francisco (Q62), Geolocation{-122.4183, 37.775})
This requires that Geolocation be a special type like integer or float. VERY BAD. There would be a massive proliferation of such things.
Alternatively Wikidata could do this as
Q95 (or whatever) = new object
longitude(Q95, -122.4183)
latitude(Q95, 37.775)
location(San Francisco (Q62), Q95)
This is the standard reified approach used by binary semantic networks and is ugly as sin, unnecessarily polluting the object space with little object poops. The clean way to do this would have been to declare location to be ternary, so we could say:
location(San Francisco (Q62), -122.4183, 37.775)
- mmarx 5y agoWikidata statements are not binary, and values are not untyped. However, there is the concept of “simple statements”, especially in conjunction with the RDF exports (although not untyped, these data usually look like binary relations). Indeed, any statement can be annotated by a list of “qualifiers”, each of which can have zero or more values, can have references (which can have their own qualifiers) As for types, “GlobeCoordinateValues”[0], i.e., locations, form one of the types allowed for values, and consist not only of two integers, but indeed of four distinct values: latitude, longitude, precision, and the reference globe, since Wikidata does not limit coordinates to the Earth. There is also no “massive proliferation”, the data model[1] knows 12 types[2], of which four are four different kinds of texts (untranslated, monolingual, multi-lingual, and list of multilingual texts). [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel#Geographic_locations https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel#Geographic... [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel#Datatypes_and_their_Values https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel#Datatypes_...