[since it is my first intervention here, I quickly introduce myself: math
PhD student, hobbist coder, interested by the semantic universe but I
don’t know much than the general ideas for now.]
Le Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:56:37 +0200, JFC Morfin <jefsey(a)jefsey.com> a écrit:
> 3. Then, the third problem no one has addressed yet except ISO 3166,
> is variance : two identical particulars (effects, names, data, etc.)
> may be different. eg. there are many ways to compute and present the
> same date. Are the results to be stored in Wikidata in all these ways
> every day and bridges to be built? or are they to be stored as a
> single data with the formulas to compute them, then how to be sure
> some parameters have not changed (i.e. death of the Emperor) and
> computation was not tampered with? Variance is everywhere (actually
> variance is most probably Life). ISO 3166 has no variance, because it
> is the sovereign reference: the list of States and laws languages
> (however, Palestine is in it already, Taiwan is there). ISO documents
> are in French, English and possibly in Russian. ISO 3166:1 states
> which are the normative languages in every country by reference to
> ISO 639 (list of language names). ISO 3166 defines the ccTLDs and is
> used in langtags to document languages and cultures. ISO 10646
> (supported by UNICODE) is the scripts character coded tables. At
> binary layer it is full of variants (same graphs being supported by
> different code points).
I’m interested in this point since one often encounter on Wikipedia
uncertainty/variance about some data:
* dates can be known with some uncertainty (e.g. "born between -345 and
-342", or "born in 734 or 736, depending of sources")
* fixed dates could not be sufficient (e.g. "not born"/"not dead" for some
mythological/religious characters, or "eternal" for the Eternal President
of the Republic of North Korea)
* some physical constants are defined up to a given precision (e.g.
Avogadro constant)
* names whose the writing is not fixed because of an oral tradition
* the nationality of some people changed during their life so it cannot be
considered in some specific cases as "one" data (e.g. Einstein)
Sébastien
PS: just curious: from what I understood, Unicode define some
normalization rules to assure the unicity of a glyph vs code point (form
C), no?