Ivan,
Thanks for the
reply. Yes as many people should be brought in about subject indexing as can be
found. The UDC is a faceted classification; LCC (Lib of Congress Classification)
and DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) are not. UDC is a multilingual
taxonomy (facet=language) and these other two are not. To me there's little
to no competition with UDC.
But that's
about what taxonomies are deployed -- I support many and all. It's the
implementing technology that's key here and happily doensn't require expert
panels and study groups. SKOS can handle multiple
facets -- via its Collection objects. I view SKOS as a stepping
stone to ISO Topic Maps; I suspect SKOS has been invented by the W3 as a
response to Topic Map functionality not in OWL, but perhaps you can enlighten me
further. Basically I have these questions.
1. Is WP going to be
empowered with subject indexes as a core feature? Is this better an
extension?
2. What's the
relative priority of subject indexes over other wikidata requirements (ie after
Semantic Infoboxes)
3. Should SKOS or a
very close equivalent be subsumed into the WOM?
The answer to 3
probably should echo the realtionship between the WOM and the OWL, whatever that
is intended to be.
Thanks,
John
On Mar 31, 2012, at 02:00 , John McClure
wrote:
> Hello,
> Can/should wiki subject indexes be a functional
requirement of the wikidata
> project, or of some other? I think
navigating a wiki today without a subject
> index is difficult, to say the
least. A subject index seems such a critical
> component for information
libraries! WP's portals are a nice step but still,
> users seem at the
mercy of topical links inserted by authors of the portal.
> How much
better it would be to have a taxonomy of subjects that can be
> associated
with a page by ITS author so that the page can be found
> independently of
portals.
I see a major issue with the user interface of this (though I agree with
your assessment). It has to be very easy to set the right subject, otherwise
people will not do it.
The dbpedia people extract some rough classification of the articles. It is
not perfect, but may be worth looking at that, too.
> The semantics of SKOS, I suggest, should be baked in to wikis. I
also
> suggest faceted UDC [1] or similar inter/national classification
scheme be
> one of many that can be referenced by users when browsing any
wiki. I
> envision that Subjects would be defined in a namespace as
fundamental to a
> wiki as the Category namespace is. Basically, I can see
requesting some
> software to correlate my own subject taxonomy with
interwikis' (WP's)
> tasxonomies, so that I as a user don't have to
manually search each
> interwiki for content relative to my personal list
of subjects.
I think the project should reach out to libraries, ie, real experts. The
library world is currently looking at the issues of how to redefine cataloging
standards, how to make them Linked Data friendly, etc; because that work is
still in flux, it may be the ideal time to talk to them. In view of the
importance of WP, libraries cannot allow themselves to ignore this (I
believe...)
Ivan