We do have the "Quote" property (P1683) which has monolingual text
datatype. You could certainly put free text in the value for this property
and add this to a reference or even use it as a qualifier.
Joe
On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler(a)wikimedia.de>
wrote:
Am 01.04.2015 um 09:20 schrieb Valentine Charles:
-Cultural Heritage data have most of the time a
description property
where you
will find lot of relevant free text information.
The structured property
but
inside you will find mostly free- text. I
couldn't find a similar
property in
Wikidata but there is something similar in
Dbpedia. Is it something you
are
planning to introduce or have you made the
decision to exclude any
free-text
infromation from Wikidata for now.
Free-form text is not machine-readable. Coding semi-structured information
is
very common in archives etc, but makes the data very hard to export,
transform,
and query. Free text fields should be used only for things that are
actually
text, such as a state motto.
I think the need to encode things in free-form fields arose mostly from
overly
rigid data schemas. If there's no dedicated field for something, just
stuff the
info into the text field. Such fields turn into kitchen sinks that contain
a
hodge podge of different kinds of information.
With Wikidata, there should be no need for this, since you can just create
and
use any properties you might be missing. That does mean though that wile
importing, you have to somehow extract the relevant information from the
free
text. That effort has to be done at some point, if the data is to become
machine
readable.
-While I was looking for painting in Wikidata I
also noticed the absence
of
information related to the size/dimension of the
Artwork. The
information is
most of the time present in Cultural Heritage
data. Is it something
Wikidata is
interested in or has it been omitted
intentionally?
We don't support units of measurement yet, and without these, it's not
really
possible to give the dimension. We hope to finally change this over the
next
couple of months.
-Then the last question is about values in
different languages for a
given
property. How do you indicate the language in
Wikidata? Are you using a
xml:lang
attribute or something similar?
xml:lang would be used in the XML/RDF export (and lang in the HTML
rendering).
Internally, the language would be a string associated with the "language"
key in
a JSON structure. But neither fact is really relevant to the data model on
an
abstract level.
Most properties (most data types) are language agnostic. Quantities,
strings,
time values, etc, do not have any notion of language. The only datatype for
properties that supports a language code is "monolingual text" (a pair of
language code + text). This data type is used sparingly, since usually,
the need
for internationalized naming and description is covered by the labels,
descriptions, and aliases associated with a data item.
Labels, descriptions, and aliases are not "properties" about which
(sourced)
statements would be made in the context of the data item. Instead, they are
editorial attributes. They are fully internationalized, and intended to
enable
display, disambiguation, and search in as many languages as possible.
For example, Q219831 has labels (and descriptions) in many languages:
* nl: De Nachtwacht (schilderij van Rembrandt van Rijn)
* de: Die Nachtwache (Gemälde von Rembrandt)
* en: The Night Watch (painting by Rembrandt van Rijn)
* ru: Ночной дозор (картина)
So, when the painting is referenced elsewhere, a label (and description)
can be
shown in the user's language. Internationalized statements/properties are
rarely
needed.
--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
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