Hi:

Strong opinion here: I never understood, why having item "former X" in the first place? This seems to be an inelegant, heavy and lazzy way to model things. I feel that the whole "former X" should be burn.
Why not just not use "X" with an end date? For me, it seems to be a way better, lighter and more precise structure. Plus, most of the time, it's closer to what the sources say.
We use that method quite often (for French communes for instance - I remove all the "former French commune" whenever I saw them -, but also for all humans, we never put "former human" just because they are dead, and we don't put "former politician" as occupation just because they're not politician anymore) and it works perfectly.
Finally, if we go down the "former X" way, 'in fine', it would double the size of Wikidata (as anything and everything can become a former something) for no good reason (at least I don't see any, especially as the growth of Wikidata seems to be a concern for some).

Cheers, ~nicolas

Le sam. 11 mai 2019 à 18:41, Ettore RIZZA <ettorerizza@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hello, 

It seems legit that a "former" something is no longer something and shouldn't be included among the instances of "something". But it doesn't sound like orthodox ontological modeling. I guess it's a workaround because we can't add a qualifier (e. g. time validity) to P31 or P279 properties (why by the way?) 

Cheers,

Ettore Rizza


Le sam. 11 mai 2019 à 18:12, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hoi,
Does this mean that any former country are no longer considered as a country ? What is then meant by a "former administrative territorial entity"? I am afraid that without readily available clear definitions, this is just an academic exercise. 

In order to help understand it, what are the use cases? How will maps of such entities be shown, how will this relate to maps of "countries" that are still in existence and may have co-existed? How do you deal with maps of countries that no longer represent facts on the ground??
Thanks,
      GerardM 

On Sat, 11 May 2019 at 11:13, Fabrizio Carrai <fabrizio.carrai@gmail.com> wrote:
Indeed there are many things to review, the Thomas' link is very useful:

1) The classes of the geopolitical divisions (btw, it was the original subject of this thread) rooted by "country"|(Q6256)  have to be separated by the classification of the system of government "state" (Q7275), as noted below.
2) An historical country will have not be part of the "country" class, eventually moved under the "former administrative territorial entity" Q19953632 class (to be reviewed as well)

The first concept matches an OpenStreetMap concept to map the reality, a picture of the present.

Fabrizio

Il giorno mer 8 mag 2019 alle ore 11:15 Thomas Douillard <thomas.douillard@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> I'm a bit puzzled by a ranking with at preference in an "instance of" but...

It’s indeed an interesting point. The problem in the country domain is that there is a lot of evolution into the regime of a state, a state can be sovereign at some point in history then become a part of a bigger state losing its sovereignty. If we assume a kind of continuity of a state across this status change, we have to use ranks to select the last valid value. There may not be items for all the regime of a state in history, and a practical choice could be to store the information in the « instance of » statements with date qualifiers.

In this case I assume however it’s just a practical way to circumvene the complexity or even inexistence of our ontology on countries. I would in most case would have noted that « sovereign state » is a subclass of « country ». If you want to include countries of all kind and don’t miss any, you’d have to use a construction like
> ?country wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q6256.

The problem with this is that there is many subclasses of « wd:Q6256 » (country) : https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html?lang=fr&q=Q6256&rp=279 so this might include some unwanted « countries ». It would be interesting to check what the differences are, to see which one is best or if some subclasses of country should not be.

There for example a subclass of « wd:Q6256 » that is « former countries », so this query would include former entities.

My opinion on these is that if we choose a scheme where there are classes or former entities, the best would be to have the counterpart « today’s country » (with label (country) and a superclass for both, « country (either former or not ) ») to avoid having the « former country » class be a subclass of «today’s country».

Another question, why is not « sovereign state » as the sole class not enough for this query ? Or only the state recognized by the United Nations (I don’t know if/how we model this) ?



Le mar. 7 mai 2019 à 23:51, Fabrizio Carrai <fabrizio.carrai@gmail.com> a écrit :
Thank you Nicolas!
I found the same situation for other countries like France (Q142) and Germany (Q183), maybe in many others. I'm a bit puzzled by a ranking with at preference in an "instance of" but...
Is there a way to extend the query to all the values of the property ?

Fabrizio

Il giorno mar 7 mag 2019 alle ore 22:54 Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas@gmail.com> ha scritto:
Hi,

This query only search for "country" (Q6256) but Italy, like many other items, has a preferred ranking on the value "sovereign state" (Q3624078), so by default, Italy doesn't appears as a country (which is strange but not totally illogical "country" is a quite broad term).

Cheers, ~nicolas

Le mar. 7 mai 2019 à 22:11, Fabrizio Carrai <fabrizio.carrai@gmail.com> a écrit :
Can anybody explain why Italy is not shown in the results of the "Wikidata Query Service" example "Continents, countries, regions and capitals" [1] ?
I suppose because Italy is belonging to two different continents (Europe and Africa). If this is the case I'm not able to fix the query.

Thanks

--
Fabrizio

[1] https://query.wikidata.org/#%23Continents%2C%20countries%2C%20regions%20and%20capitals%0A%23defaultView%3ATree%0ASELECT%20%3Fcontinent%20%3FcontinentFlag%20%3FcontinentLabel%20%3Fcountry%20%3FcountryLabel%20%3FcountryFlag%20%3Fregion%20%3FregionLabel%20%3FregionFlag%20%3Fcity%20%3FcityLabel%20%3FcityImage%20%3Fproperty%20%3FpropertyLabel%20%3Fvalue%20%3FvalueLabel%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20SELECT%20%2a%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcontinent%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ5107.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcountry%20wdt%3AP30%20%3Fcontinent.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcountry%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ6256.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcountry%20wdt%3AP150%20%3Fregion.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20OPTIONAL%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcontinent%20wdt%3AP242%20%3FcontinentFlag.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcountry%20wdt%3AP41%20%3FcountryFlag.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fregion%20wdt%3AP41%20%3FregionFlag.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20OPTIONAL%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fregion%20wdt%3AP36%20%3Fcity.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcity%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ515.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcity%20wdt%3AP18%20%3FcityImage.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20OPTIONAL%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20VALUES%20%28%3Fprop%29%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP1082%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP6%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP190%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP31%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP571%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP150%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP206%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%28wdt%3AP527%29%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fcity%20%3Fprop%20%3Fvalue.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fproperty%20%3Fref%20%3Fprop.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Fproperty%20rdf%3Atype%20wikibase%3AProperty.%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%7D%0A%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22%5BAUTO_LANGUAGE%5D%2Cen%22.%20%7D%0A%7D

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