Wikidata:Property proposal/part of terminology

part of terminology edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

   Not done
DescriptionProperty indicating that the concept is part of a terminology
Representsterminology (Q1725664)
Data typeItem
Domainterminology (Q1725664)
Example 1adiabatic flow (Q59467285)physics terminology (Q76430006)
Example 2recruitment (Q3422540)biology terminology (Q77698139)
Example 3unity (Q55181023)philosophy terminology (Q77706469)

Begrundelse edit

Hi, It was suggested to me by @Jheald: @Wikisaurus: to create this proposal to avoid polluting P:361 (part of) with terminologies as well as P31 with x term.

I find that many of our science items are very lacking in the number of statements and this property is designed to help round them up from petscan and enrich them further by adding P31, P279, P361, etc.

Further down the road this property might become superfluous when all items related to a particular science can easily be queried by their P31, P279, P361, etc...

With this property it will be easy to generate special terminologies from lexemes linked to Q-items with this property.

Another advantage of this is that we could create at tool that lets the user choose scientific area and get a terminology shown on the fly. Another advantage could be a variant of the Ordias text-to-lexemes but limited to a certain terminology say describe all the terms in this text that has a specific meaning in a certain area e.g. law or AI.--So9q (talk) 14:36, 9 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion edit

  •   Oppose Fundamental objection: wikidata is not a thesaurus (Q17152639). We are not a dictionary of terminology. We are a database of concepts as things in their own right. Our items and statements describe concepts and how they relate to each other, not terms. Keeping this distinction straight is very important to understanding the properties we have on our items. We need to do our very best to avoid confusion as to what our items are supposed to represent, and this property would cause massive confusion.
A problem we have, that I think may have motivated this proposal, is that we often have massive holes in our ontology, which makes it hard to describe what things actually are as things. Plus, doing so is often a decidedly non-trivial task. So we can have orphan items like adiabatic flow (Q59467285), which one might want to describe as subclass of (P279): "flow" / has characteristic (P1552) adiabatic process (Q182453), perhaps also with subclass of (P279) = adiabatic process (Q182453) as well. But at the moment this is hard, because we don't have a good item for "flow", and it may require quite a high level of understanding to define well in statements what a "flow" actually is. Indeed, a good definition might require the creation of even more items which are currently missing, making the process even longer and more onerous to complete before adiabatic flow (Q59467285) is properly meaningfully placed in our ontology. So it stays as it is at the moment, with essentially no identifying information on it -- no information to place even what area of knowledge it may relate to, no information even to identify how much infomation it is lacking; in short, not even enough information to tag it and identify it as being so deficient. And we have thousands, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of items in just this state. What to do?
Thesauruses get round this problem by being less ambitious. Instead of trying to define through statements what a thing or concept actually is, they restrict themselves to merely trying to place it as a term within a wider area of terminology -- an easier job, which can be done more quickly, places the term and makes it discoverable, and which can then allow it to be added to or refined. In our context, marking that concept was located within a particular field of knowledge, but had no defining subclass of (P279) or instance of (P31) statements would effectively well tag the collection of such items within a particular knowledge area, allowing them to be readily retrieved as a particular group of items in that area needing improvement.
So I think I can understand the motivation for this property.
But I don't think the present proposal works, and I really don't like the idea of building a "terminology" tree. As I said at the top, Wikidata is not about terms and terminology. Its items stand for concepts.
So is there an alternative?
One useful property for items extracted from thesauruses is broader concept (P4900), applied as a qualifier on the external link statement, and pointing to the wikidata item for the nearest thing we can match to that is above the item we are describing in the hierarchy of that external source. (With additional qualifier sourcing circumstances (P1480) = hierarchical link is not direct (Q50095342) if the external child -> parent linkage is not single=step). I am interested to know what the proposer User:So9q thinks of this, because I think it may be able to deliver much of the functionality they are seeking, without us having to build a "terminology" tree. Another suggestion, at WD:Project Chat was to use studied in (P2579) to indicate the broad discipline that the concept is studied by. (Though we should perhaps look at whether P2579 is currently used in such a many-to-one way, to tag many concepts within a single discipline; or more often in a narrower way, ideally 1-to-1 to try to indicate the thing that the discipline studies). That needs to be checked; but again, this could be a way to avoid building up an artificial "terminology" tree, which is at variance to how Wikidata tries to model things.
Finally on focus list of Wikimedia project (P5008) may be worth mentioning, as a way to tag items that are (or should be) the targets of particular active interest, need, or improvement. (Also usable with qualifiers, to break a particular checklist of topics into particular sublists). This could be used, if particular items were to be marked as being in a particular area, and in need of particular improvement. Jheald (talk) 00:05, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Big thanks for the thorough comment and thinking out alternatives to this approach! Could you give an example of an item with broader concept (P4900) applied as a qualifier on the external link statement?
I welcome the studied in (P2579) approach but I'm unsure of how to explore the relationships you suggested.--So9q (talk) 10:39, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@So9q: I don't know if P4900 has been used much otherwise, but one area where it was added (about 18 months ago) was for clothing items, referenced against the 'fashion' part of the Getty AAT thesaurus. If you look at Property talk:P4900 there's a query there that finds WD subclass of (P279) relationships that don't correspond to the AAT hierarchy, and vice-versa. Also some further discussion under Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Fashion#AAT. Jheald (talk) 13:48, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
ipso facto (L227969), sense 3 → part of terminology → legal language (Q76419834) seems to be a more valid request, but we should first check for prior art and how this relationship is named elsewhere before making a property for that. ChristianKl17:18, 17 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @ChristianKl: I think it would be the best way for modelling the abbreviatures before the definition: e.g. xanthosis
(pathology) A yellowish discolouration of tissues undergoing degeneration.
(alchemy) Synonym of citrinitas
We could use the value medical terminology (Q1192539) in the first sense, and "alchemy terminology" in the second. --Tinker Bell 05:48, 18 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Not done --99of9 (talk) 04:43, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]