Gregor, James, I don't know if you are familiar with OWL and other semantic web standards, but if you are then the following explanation might be useful for you:
The most precise general term for Snak in Semantic Web speak would be "axiom". The term "assertion" is more specific, since an assertion in ontology languages is an axiom that expresses instance-level information about individuals and literals. You may also have heard of the related terminology "ABox" that is used in description logics, again referring to instance-level knowledge. Snaks, in contrast, could also express some schema level statements, so calling them assertions would be misleading for people who are familiar with OWL and similar languages.
On the other hand, "axiom" would also be a poor choice of name. For one thing, it is not certain that all Snaks will have an easy reading as OWL axioms, and there are certainly many OWL axioms that cannot be written as Snaks. Moreover, the word "axiom" already has a variety of meanings in other contexts, none of which is what we mean here. Since Snaks are a purely technical construct in Wikidata that will mainly be seen by developers, we have thus given them a name that does not suggest anything specific.
Markus
On 05/04/12 04:51, James HK wrote:
Hi,
When I glanced over the data model description and found the word 'Snaks' [1] as entity or unit of facts, it created some interpretive confusion. Semantic web already uses some abstract language to describe entity concepts, if possible don't introduce another one just to describe a new concept and if necessary please choose a descriptor that is more self-explanatory.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Data_model#Snaks
Cheers
On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Gregor Hagedorng.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote:
Would the Word "assertion" be a possible replacement for the neonym "Snak"?
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