On 18/10/2018 22:33, Markus Kroetzsch wrote:
And, on another note, there is also a huge misunderstanding exposed in the discussion on th search-related tracker item [1]: Cparle there speaks about "traversing the subclass hierarchy" but is actually looking at *super*classes of, e.g., "Clarinet", which he mostly finds irrelevant to users who care about clarinets. But surely that's the wrong direction! You have to look for *sub*classes to find special cases of what you are looking for. Looking downwards will often lead to much saner ontologies than when turning your head towards the dizzy heights of upper ontology. Yes, the few of us looking for instances of "logical consequence" will still get clarinets, but those who look for instances of clarinet merely will see instances of alto clarinet, piccolo clarinet, basset horn, Saxonette, and so on [2]. So instead of trying to suggest to Commons editors meaningful "upper concepts", one could simply enable the use of lower concepts in search. It does not work in all cases yet, but it many.
Not really.
Cparle wants to make sure that people searching for "clarinet" also get shown images of "piccolo clarinet" etc.
To make this possible, where an image has been tagged "basset horn" he is therefore looking to add "clarinet" as an additional keyword, so that if somebody types "clarinet" into the search box, one of the images retrieved by ElasticSearch will be the basset horn one.
I imagine there are pluses and minuses both ways, whether you try to make sure one search returns more hits, or try to run multiple searches each returning fewer hits.
Your suggestion of the latter approach may not involve so much pre-investigation of the top of the tree, which may be terms that people are less likely to search for; but on the other hand, the actual searching may be less efficient than a single indexed search.
There are still problems (such as the biological taxonomy being modelled as a hierarchy of names rather than animal classes, placing dog far away from mammal), but it is still always much easier to come up with a sane organisation for the *sub*classes of a concrete class.
For what it's worth, there's currently quite a lively discussion on Project Chat about issues with the current modelling of biological taxonomies, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Taxonomy:_concept_centri...
People on this thread might like to comment on some of the less fortunate elements of current practice, and the appropriateness of some of the thoughts that have been suggested.
But the taxo project has become such a walled garden, answerable only to itself, that people with comments may need to be quite forceful to get their message through, if we are to deal eg with some of the difficulties Cparle describes in the ticket at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T199119
-- James.
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