Hoi,
As far as I am concerned, it is relevant to compare "settlements" in whatever country they are. A British "city" is always located in the United Kingdom and even more precise it is "in the administrative unit of" a county or whatever. When it is a city for historical reasons, this can be indicated with a qualifier.

In this way it is "is a" "settlement" and the rest can be deduced. Having specific types of settlements for countries is imho not necessary in this way.
Thanks,
     GerardM


On 10 June 2014 22:14, David Cuenca <dacuetu@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Gerard,

I think we should not aim for a "perfect" system, just for "a better one". In our case we don't need to reproduce all cases, just identify the most relevant ones and to clarify when to use each and label/describe them clearly.

"Part of" is understood, but in so many possible ways that its meaning gets diluted into uselessness.

Thanks,
Micru



On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 9:50 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,

I fear that when words like mereology are expected to be understood, we will fall into the trap where our communities fear what we have been sniffing. It will just alienate them.

Part of is something that is understood. There may be academic reasons that make sense to the people who care about them. The question I think we should take serious is if that is really where we want to go.
Thanks,
     GerardM


On 10 June 2014 20:21, David Cuenca <dacuetu@gmail.com> wrote:
I think we should drop "part of" and start using a better mereological system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology#Various_systems
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/image1.png

Cheers,
Micru


On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 8:05 PM, Joe Filceolaire <filceolaire@gmail.com> wrote:
Even where there is complete agreement that a human settlement is a 'city' there is still usually a question over the population of that city. The question is down to what to include. 

A city in many cases is understood to include the contiguous built up area but this will often extend far beyond the original administrative region that bears the name. So we have the "City of London" (the central business district, corresponding to the medieval and Roman city), "Greater London" (The collection of contiguous urban boroughs that area part of the Greater London administrative entity - ironically this does not include the "City of London" but does include the "City of Westminster"), all the built up areas out to the "Metropolitan green belt" (includes bits of every county adjacent to Greater London), or all areas within commuting distance of Central London (with the train services this includes a lot of area and it is getting bigger as faster trains are deployed).

When do two cities become one? London and Westminster? Buda and Pest? Minneapolis and St Paul? Dallas and Fort Worth? Kansas MI and Kansas KA? Dusseldorf, Essen and Dortmund? Detroit and Windsor?

Joe


On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
On 10 June 2014 09:20, Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:

> The class "city" is used for "relatively large and permanent human
> settlement[s]" [1], which does not say much (because the vagueness of
> "relatively"). Maybe we should even wonder if "city" is a good class to use
> in Wikidata. Saying that something has been awarded city status in the UK
> (Q1867820) has a clear meaning. Saying that something is a "human
> settlement" is also rather clear. But drawing the line between "village",
> "city" and "town" is quite tricky, and will probably never be done uniformly
> across the data.
>
> Conclusion: if you are looking for, say, human settlements with more than
> 100k inhabitants, then you should be searching for just that (which I think
> is basically what you also are saying below :-).

OSM has had a lot of problems with this as well, I think - labelling
something as a "city" is one of those very slippery terms that
everyone thinks is obvious but never quite agrees on what the obvious
bit is :-)

I wonder if we should think about how best to make sure people know
this. Perhaps there is a role for the "human-readable" pages to have
disambiguation-type notes on them? "If you are aiming to do a search
based on "instances of 'city'", we recommend you try "instances of
'human settlement'" instead..."

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk

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