On 18/10/2018 22:33, Markus Kroetzsch wrote:
And, on another note, there is also a huge misunderstanding exposed in
the discussion on th search-related tracker item [1]: Cparle there
speaks about "traversing the subclass hierarchy" but is actually looking
at *super*classes of, e.g., "Clarinet", which he mostly finds irrelevant
to users who care about clarinets. But surely that's the wrong
direction! You have to look for *sub*classes to find special cases of
what you are looking for. Looking downwards will often lead to much
saner ontologies than when turning your head towards the dizzy heights
of upper ontology. Yes, the few of us looking for instances of "logical
consequence" will still get clarinets, but those who look for instances
of clarinet merely will see instances of alto clarinet, piccolo
clarinet, basset horn, Saxonette, and so on [2]. So instead of trying to
suggest to Commons editors meaningful "upper concepts", one could simply
enable the use of lower concepts in search. It does not work in all
cases yet, but it many.
Not really.
Cparle wants to make sure that people searching for "clarinet" also get
shown images of "piccolo clarinet" etc.
To make this possible, where an image has been tagged "basset horn" he
is therefore looking to add "clarinet" as an additional keyword, so that
if somebody types "clarinet" into the search box, one of the images
retrieved by ElasticSearch will be the basset horn one.
I imagine there are pluses and minuses both ways, whether you try to
make sure one search returns more hits, or try to run multiple searches
each returning fewer hits.
Your suggestion of the latter approach may not involve so much
pre-investigation of the top of the tree, which may be terms that people
are less likely to search for; but on the other hand, the actual
searching may be less efficient than a single indexed search.
There are still problems (such as the biological taxonomy being modelled
as a hierarchy of names rather than animal classes, placing dog far away
from mammal), but it is still always much easier to come up with a sane
organisation for the *sub*classes of a concrete class.
For what it's worth, there's currently quite a lively discussion on
Project Chat about issues with the current modelling of biological
taxonomies,
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Taxonomy:_concept_centric_vs_name_centric
People on this thread might like to comment on some of the less
fortunate elements of current practice, and the appropriateness of some
of the thoughts that have been suggested.
But the taxo project has become such a walled garden, answerable only to
itself, that people with comments may need to be quite forceful to get
their message through, if we are to deal eg with some of the
difficulties Cparle describes in the ticket at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T199119
-- James.
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