On 18.12.2012 17:52, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
It would be possible and very flexible, and certainly more powerful than the current system. But we would loose the convenience of having one date, which we need for query answering (or we could default to the lower or upper bound, or the middle, but all of these are a bit arbitrary).
I believe it would be more profitable to build a query system which always queries for the range. This would work for interval-only values (see my comment on the wiki page) as well as for value with interval.
I'm getting the impression that we mean the same thing, but are talking about it in different terms.
I think it would be bad to have ranges/intervals as values. They are hard to handle, misleading and easy to abuse.
I think however it would be great to have values (magnitudes) with manifest accuracy values, which can be represented as a range (or, ideally, a gamma distribution). Reading your comments, I'm getting the impression that this is basically what you want.
I don't see this as a big overhead. It is more a problem for ordering, but internally, wikidata could store a "midpoint" value for intervals where no explicit central value is given, and use these for ordering purposes.
Well, I would call that "mid point" simple "the value", and the range would be the accuracy. There's an important conceptual distinction here to having ranges as actual values.
I think it would be great if the system is consistent for quantities, dates, geographical longitude/latitude, etc.
Indeed.
-- daniel