2016-03-05 13:26 GMT+01:00 Markus Krötzsch markus@semantic-mediawiki.org:
Thanks, Katie. I see that the external ID datatype does not work as planed. At least I thought the original idea was to clean up the UI by moving hard-to-understand string IDs to a separate section. From the discussions on these pages, I see that the community uses criteria that are completely unrelated to UI aspects, but have something to do with the degree to which the property encodes a one-to-one mapping. I guess this is also valid, but won't be useful for UI purposes. I will need to use another solution for my case then.
My2c, sorry if I'm going offtopic.
My impression on some properties is that we're probably underestimating some problems that are independent from our will, such as: * the possibility that the original catalogue might have some duplicates, and we can actually help the original catalogue to correct this issue; * the possibility that the Wikimedia approach and the catalogue's approach might bring one of the two sides to define something as two different things, while the other sides comprises it as a whole (for example, "palace+gardens"); * the possibility that some identifiers *are* standardised, but the authority did not published a single catalogue, leaving the single institutes to care for their own catalogue (for example, the International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organizations, aka P791); * and so on.
Particularly the ISIL one is an important example to me, since I work for the Italian institution that actually is entitled to conduct the census of Italian libraries and assign the ISIL code to every and each library in Italy. There is no single world catalogue of that identifier? I really don't see it as a problem, as long as there it is at least one national authority that does that job. We're probably underestimating the fact that not everything has been standardised at a world level - and that we can live with that just fine.
Probably the threshold we set up for the conversion is too high, and this might be one of the causes why the whole process has slowed down to a dying pace.
L.