Another way to formulate this is that "The labels are our name for the property and we can force them to be unique, while the aliases are other peoples names for similar properties and as we can't control them they won't be unique."
On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 1:43 PM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
We will get clashes between different ontologies, can't see how we can avoid that. Our label should be unique, but not aliases. We use aliases as a way to access something that we later must disambiguate. We should not have a uniqueness constraint on aliases, it simply makes no sense.
On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Daniel Kinzler daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de wrote:
Am 08.07.2015 um 13:11 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:
Technically there is no problem disambiguating. People are really good understanding what a property means based on context. Machines do not care for labels (really)..
For items, that is exactly hgow it is. For properties however, that is not the case.
Consider {{#property:date of birth}}. That's much more readable than {{#property:P569}}, right? That's why properties can be *addressed* by their label, when transcluding data into wikitext. Properties have unique *names* by which they can be *used*, not just labels for display, like items do.
The problem we have is that you cannot change a propertie's label, because you would break usage in {{#property}} calls. Unless you keep the old label as an alias. Which can only work if the alias is unique, too.
-- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
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