What you describe is the problem that arise from preferred label vs alternate label, and that "our" labels are used as preferred labels while the aliases are used as alternate label. The first is sort of correct while the last is not correct. Create a new alternate label that can be used for unique lookup.
What you want is closer to a redirect than an alias, while an alias is closer to a disambiguation page.
For an example of an ontology; assume you want aliases for DCterms and we have properties height, width, length. Then those three properties would all have the alias "DCterms extent". We are actually planning to create properties for height, width and length, it is only me that want extent.
On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 1:54 PM, Daniel Kinzler daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de wrote:
Am 08.07.2015 um 13:43 schrieb John Erling Blad:
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.
That's what we had. The problem is: you can't change the label without changing all references to it, then. IF properites can also be addressed by their aliases, it's simple to change the primary name (label), or add a secondary name (alias).
What kind of clash with another ontology do you mean? Can you give a concrete example?
-- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata