Hoi,

My answer is that every past king is not a king but an office holder. For me the name king is just a label; there is no logic in the way it is applied. There are empires where the office holder is called a king for instance... For me they are all monarchs. They are associated with a specific country.

This prevents illogical things like "follows" on a person; for me they are qualifiers because all too often one person can have multiple predecessors and successors. It is the only sane way to do this (imho).

Thanks,

GerardM

On 9 January 2017 at 13:36, Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de> wrote:

On 09.01.2017 12:55, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi,
It is in the logic. When a king is a monarch and a monarch is a
politician I am fine. But when people insist that a "King of Iberia" is
a subclass it does not make sense. People hold the office of and it is
singular. When such things result in struggles, I think we have a problem.

I would say: "Every King of Iberia was also a king."

Only the "current king of Iberia" is a single person, but Wikidata is about all of history, so there are many such kings. The office of "King of Iberia" is still singular (it is a singular class) and it can have its own properties etc. I would therefore say (without having checked the page):

King of Iberia instance of office
King of Iberia subclass of king

I have asked in the past to explain the nonsense on items like monarch.
When I look at Reasonator there is so much that is plain problematic
that it is best to ignore it. What complicates it is that the ontology
seems to end with politician and that is a travesty in and of itself.
With other "occupations" there is a wealth of upper levels that seem to
be completely arbitrary and when asked I find it reasonable that nobody
steps up to explain because the consequences of answers are problematic.

I agree that there are many cases that need to be modelled in a more coherent way. I can only imagine progress in this area to happen on a case-by-case basis. One really has to look into the details and check what works best in each case. Often there is no wrong or right here, but there is a choice how to model things. But once a choice is made, it should be applied coherently throughout.

Regards,

Markus

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