After thinking some more about the merits of the augmenting the
category system or creating a new system, I thought of the following:
The Category tag can only ever represent an "is a" relationship.
By adding the Category:Human tag to Liam Neeson, we are really trying
to convey that Liam Neeson IS A human. The category system is perfect
for defining this kind of information. However, the category system
cannot be used to define any other kind of relationship. For example,
in the Anne Frank article, it is not currently possible in wikipedia
to have an "author of" relationship.
It would therefore be a good idea to add an AuthorOf tag to wikipedia.
There are many other relationships like this that could be defined.
Each such relationship should have a well defined domain and co-domain
(For those that are unfamiliar with these terms, I will explain them
with an example). Consider the "Author of" relationship:
(Lewis Carroll) AuthorOf (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
AuthorOf is a relation, that maps a Person to a Book.
We say that the domain of AuthorOf is People, and the co-domain of
AuthorOf is Books.
Each new relation defined in wikipedia would have to have a domain and
a co-domain associated with it. For the sake of example, I will create
the following syntax to define a new relationship:
Relation: AuthorOf
Domain: Person
CoDomain: Book
Because we have defined the domains of the AuthorOf relation, we can
now do some very powerfull stuff with wikipedia:
Imagine Dave is a user of wikipedia, who does not know about defining
categories. He is doing some research on the web on his favourite
author, Lewis Carroll, and notices that there is no page on wikipedia
about him. He goes ahead and creates the page, and he also creates two
pages for Lewis' most famour books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass. Dave does not add his new pages to any
category.
At the same time Mike is looking at the recent changes, and sees the
new editions on Lewis Caroll, and decides to have a look at the pages.
He notices that Dave has not defined the AuthorOf relationship, so on
the Lewis Caroll page Mike adds:
[[AuthorOf:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]]
[[AuthorOf:Through the Looking Glass]]
Remember that Wikipedia knows that the domain of the AuthorOf relation
is Person, and that the co-domain is Book, so it can automatically add
Category:Person to Lewis Caroll, and Category:Book to Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
We can also define an inverse of AuthorOf: consider the revised syntax:
Relation: AuthorOf
Inverse: WrittenBy
Domain: Person
CoDomain: Book
Now when someone defines that Lewis Carroll was the AuthorOf Through
the Looking Glass, Wikipedia will automatically know that Through the
Looking Glass was written by Lewis Carroll.
Mikes adds the tag [[AuthorOf:Through the Looking Glass]] to Lewis
Caroll, and Wikipedia will automatically add [[WrittenBy:Lewis
Carrol]] to the Through the Looking Glass page.
What does anyone else think?
--
Marc O'Morain