On 11.08.2016 18:45, Andra Waagmeester wrote:
On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de mailto:markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de> wrote:
has a statement "population: 20,086 (point in time: 2011)" that is confirmed by a reference. Nevertheless, the statement is marked as "deprecated". This would mean that the statement "the popluation was 20,086 in 2011" is wrong. As far as I can tell, this is not the case.
I wouldn't say that with a deprecated rank, that statement is "wrong". I consider de term deprecated to indicate that a given statement is no longer valid in the context of a given resource (reference). I agree, in this specific case the use of the deprecated rank is wrong, since no references are given to that specific statement. Nevertheless, I think it is possible to have disagreeing resources on an identical statement, where two identical statements exists, one with rank "deprecated" and one with rank "normal". It is up to the user to decide which source s/he trusts.
The status "deprecated" is part of the claim of the statement. The reference is supposed to support this claim, which in this case is also the claim that it is deprecated. The status is not meant to deprecate a reference (not saying that this is never useful, potentially, but you can only use it in one way, and it seems much more practical if deprecated statements get references that explain why they are deprecated).
It seems that somebody wanted to indicate that this old population is no longer current. This is achieved not by deprecating the old value, but by setting another (newer) value as "preferred".
I would argue that this is better done by using qualifiers (e.g. start data, end data). If a statement on the population size would be set to preferred, but isn't monitored for quite some time, it can be difficult to see if the "preferred" statement is still accurate, whereas a qualifier would give a better indication that that stament might need an update.
Sure, there should always be qualifiers as needed, and we already have qualifiers like start and end date in most cases. However, one should still set the "best" statemnt(s) to be preferred as a help for users of the data. When you use date in queries or in LUA, it would be very hard to analyse all statements' qualifiers to find out which one is currently the best. The "preferred" rank gives a simple shortcut there. In SPARQL, for example, the best ranked statements will be used in the simplified "direct" properties in namespace wdt: Users who want to get all the details can still use the qualifiers, but this leads to more complicated queries.
Best regards,
Markus
Cheers,
Andra
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