Markus Krötzsch wrote: > 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.
Does the type have to be "Value list", or can you add "has fields" to other properties? My reasoning: in the "Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web" article[1], a distinction was made between an N-ary relation that represents a primary value with supplementary information and an N-ary relation that represents different aspects of a common relation with no preference for one value over any of the others. It occurs to me that by allowing "has fields" on non-"Value list" property pages, we could capture this distinction quite intuitively: if the property page includes "has type:: Value list", then there is no primary value: any queries concerning values for that page must refer to the fields; if the property page specifies any other type, then that is considered to be the primary value, and queries for values on that page assume that you're referring to the primary value unless you explicitly ask for the fields. Related to this is the notion of named fields. Please give the option to attach meaningful names to the fields for querying purposes, so that the user doesn't have to specify a positional list of values. For instance: [[has fields:: name=String; count=Number; source=Page]] This would allow queries for instances of the property by means of a specific value for the name, property, and/or source. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/NOTE-swbp-n-aryRelations-20060412 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
