Hi Antoine,
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Antoine Zimmermann antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr wrote:
Hello,
I have a few questions about how statement qualifiers should be used.
First, my understanding of qualifiers is that they define statements about statements. So, if I have the statement:
Q17(Japan) P6(head of government) Q132345(Shinzō Abe)
with the qualifier:
P39(office held) Q274948(Prime Minister of Japan)
it means that the statement holds an office, right? It seems to me that this is incorrect and that this qualifier should in fact be a statement about Shinzō Abe. Can you confirm this?
If I understand the example correctly then yes I agree with you. Qualifiers are there to qualify a statement. So for example to indicate how a value was measured or from when to when a given statement was true.
Second, concerning temporal qualifiers: what does it mean that the "start" or "end" is "no value"? I can imagine two interpretations:
- the statement is true forever (a person is a dead person from the moment
of their death till the end of the universe) 2. (for end date) the statement is still true, we cannot predict when it's going to end.
For me, case number 2 should rather be marked as "unknown value" rather than "no value". But again, what does "unknown value" means in comparison to having no indicated value?
Yes. The difference is that we explicitly state something to not be there or to be there but we don't know more. Example: We know person X had children but we don't know who they were.
Third, what if a statement is temporarily true (say, X held office from T1 to T2) then becomes false and become true again (like X held same office from T3 to T4 with T3 > T2)? The situation exists for Q35171(Grover Cleveland) who has the following statement:
Q35171 P39(position held) Q11696(President of the United States of America)
with qualifiers, and a second occurrence of the same statement with different qualifiers. The wikidata user interface makes it clear that there are two occurrences of the statement with different qualifiers, but how does the wikidata data model allows me to distinguish between these two occurrences?
How do I know that:
P580(start date) "March 4 1885"
only applies to the first occurrence of the statement, while:
P580(start date) "March 4 1893"
only applies to the second occurrence of the statement? I could have a heuristic that says if two "start date"s are given, then assume that they are the starting points of two disjoint intervales. But can I always guarantee this?
You can't but this is the best you can do I fear for the moment.
Cheers Lydia