On 04/04/12 23:23, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Wikidata can (and probably will) store information about each moon of
Uranus, e.g., its mass. It does probably not make sense to store the mass of
"Moons of Uranus" if there is such an article. It does not help to know that
the article "Moons on Uranus" also talks (among other things) about some
moon that has a particular mass: you need to know what *exactly* you are
talking about to exploit this data. An article on "Moons of Uranus" could
still (eventually) embed Wikidata data to improve its display, but this data
must refer to individual moons, not to the article as a whole.
The problem I see is that you have no definition to which real object
the data are tied. We agree that the problem is not the interwiki
links per se. It is what results from it. How do we tie data to a
wikidata page when we don't know what it is about?
This is a hard question. The best answer I can come up with now (on the
bus to Oxford) is as follows: the meaning of Wikidata items is subject
to social agreement, based on shared experience, communication, and
human-language documentation. The latter is provided in labels and
descriptions, in Wikipedia articles that are connected to a Wikidata
item, and also in Wikidata property pages that document properties.
I know that this may not be a satisfactory answer to your question of
how we can *really* *know* what a Wikidata item is about. If you want to
dig deeper into this issue, there is a lot of interesting literature,
which can give you many more details than I can. What we are dealing
with is the well-known philosophical problem of /grounding/. In essence,
the state of discussion boils down to the following: there is no known
way of connecting the symbols of a purely symbolic system (such as a
computer program) to real-world objects in a formal way. Going deeper
into the discussion reveals that there is also no agreed-upon way to
clarify the meaning of "real" and "object" in the first place.
In spite of all this, humans somehow manage to understand each other,
which brings us to the point of how amazing they all are :-) Wikidata is
but a humble technical tool that provides an environment for
articulating and (I hope) improving this understanding in a novel way.
This cannot provide a formal grounding, but it might come as close to
this ideal as we have gotten yet.
Regards,
Markus
--
Dr. Markus Kroetzsch
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 283529 http://korrekt.org/
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