The code for n-ary/multivalued has now been changed in SVN, and a new system is in place. This email describes the changes for users, and asks for proposals on how to label some things that users will have to enter. This thread does not discuss the maximal number of fields in a multi-valued property (there is another thread for this).
== Changes for the user ==
The old way of declaring an n-ary property was to give a type annotation like
the following on its property page:
[[has type:: String; Number; Page]]
This example declares a property that has three fields of the given order and
type. The new code requires a modified declaration that contains two
annotations:
[[has type:: Value list]]
[[has fields:: String; Number; Page]]
So the type is no longer the list but it has a name, and the list of fields is
given in a new property. This change needs to be done to all property pages
that use a declaration like the old one above (but please read on before
updating from SVN and starting with this change). With the new SMW, you can
actually ask for those properties with the query (~ is now enabled by default
for all sites):
{{#ask: [[has type::~*;*]] }}
(Note that types are not stored with their translated labels internally, so ~
queries are not likely to be of much use for has_type in general; but it works
well enough for the ";" in n-ary types. The fact that this works also
illustrates how the new SMW code consistently supports all features in the
same way for all properties/datatypes that allow it.)
== Call for labels ==
Two new labels are used above: "Value list" (the name of the type) and "has
fields" (the name of the property for declaring which fields this property
has). Both labels are just preliminary and may still be changed. We have
already had some history of changing the name of n-ary/multi-valued
properties.
Technically, the new type is not a "list" (a sequence of arbitrary length with
a fixed type) but a "tuple" (like a "pair" but not specifically with 2
values). But this term will not be meaningful to most users, so maybe list is
not so bad. We can still change it if better proposals are made.
Afterwards, we will need translations for the labels so that non-en wikis can
use their own language right away, but I will call for this in another email.
Cheers,
Markus
--
Markus Krötzsch <mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org>
* Personal page: http://korrekt.org
* Semantic MediaWiki: http://semantic-mediawiki.org
* Semantic Web textbook: http://semantic-web-book.org
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