We may possibly use an ad hoc item "City of United Kingdom", subclass of "city" and "UK administrative division", may we?
L.
On 07/06/14 00:40, Joe Filceolaire wrote:
Well they can ask.....
As there is no real definition of what is a city and what the limits of
each city are I'm not sure they will get a useful answer. The population
of the "City of London" (Q23311), for instance, is only 7,375! Should we
change it from 'instance of:city' to 'instance of:village'?
Side remark: in the UK, "city" and "town" are special legal statuses of settlements. This terminology is what "City of London" refers to. There is a clear and crisp definition for what this means, but it is not what we mean by our class "city" in Wikidata. In particular, this has no direct relationship to size: the largest UK "towns" have over 100k inhabitants.
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 :-).
Markus
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City
Even a basic query like 'people born in the Czech republic' has
problems. Should it include people born in Czechoslovakia or the
Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia? To exclude these the
query needs to check not just if the 'place of birth' of an item is 'in
the administrative entity:Czech Republic' today but whether that was
true on the 'date of birth' of each of those people.
This isn't to say that such queries are not useful. Just to point out
that real world data is tricky. The cool thing is that we are going to
have the data in Wikidata to make it theoretically feasible to drill
down and get answers to these tricky questions. Once the data is there,
open licensed for anyone to use, then it is just a matter of a letting
loose a thousand PhDs to devise clever ways to query it.
If we build it they will come!
At least that is my understanding.
Joe
On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 9:21 PM, Jeroen De Dauw <jeroendedauw@gmail.com
<mailto:jeroendedauw@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hey Yury,
We are indeed planning to use the Ask query language for Wikidata.
People will be able to define queries on dedicated query pages that
contain a query entity. These query entities will represent things
such as "The cities with highest population in Europe". People will
then be able to access the result for those queries via the web API
and be able to embed different views on them into wiki pages. These
views will be much like SMW result formats, and we might indeed be
able to share code between the two projects for that.
This functionality is still some way off though. We still need to do
a lot of work, such as creating a nice visual query builder. To
already get something out to the users, we plan to enable more
simple queries via the web API in the near future.
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com
Software craftsmanship advocate
Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany
~=[,,_,,]:3
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