On 01/09/2017 07:20 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote: > Am 09.01.2017 um 04:36 schrieb Markus Kroetzsch: >> Only the "current king of Iberia" is a single person, but Wikidata is about >> all >> of history, so there are many such kings. The office of "King of Iberia" is >> still singular (it is a singular class) and it can have its own properties >> etc. >> I would therefore say (without having checked the page): >> >> King of Iberia instance of office >> King of Iberia subclass of king > > To be semantically strict, you would need to have two separate items, one for > the office, and one for the class. Because the individual kinds have not been > instances of the office - they have been holders of the office. And they have > been instances of the class, but not holders of the class. > > On wikidata, we often conflate these things for sake of simplicity. But when > you > try to write queries, this does not make things simpler, it makes it harder. > > Anything that is a subclass of X, and at the same an instance of Y, where Y is > not "class", is problematic. I think this is the root of the confusion Gerards > speaks of.
There is no a priori reason that an office cannot be a class. Some formalisms don't allow this, but there are others that do. Some sets of rules for ontology construction don't allow this, but there are others that do. There is certainly no universal semantic consideration, even in any strict notion of semantics, that would require that there be two separate items here. As far as I can tell, the Wikidata formalism is not one that would disallow offices being classes. As far as I can tell, the rules for constructing the Wikidata ontology don't disallow it either. Peter F. Patel-Schneider Nuance Communications _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
