On 8/24/06, Nick Jenkins nickpj@gmail.com wrote:
E.g. you can't say "Imagine (song) 'is a' John Lennon (solo career)", or "I Am The Walrus 'is a' John Lennon (Beatles career)", or "Imagine (song) 'is a' British rock musicians".
That's because you haven't quite gotten what I'm getting at yet. The category wouldn't be called "John Lennon", because nothing is a John Lennon (other than, presumably, John Lennon, who would be rather lonely). Rather, under "things related to Beatles", you would have "things related to John Lennon" or something. Inelegant, I know, but I think you see where I'm going with this?
The main problem is the terminology. I mean, it works logically, but I don't think people will go for saying "No, things-related-to-the-Beatles isn't a supercategory of things-related-to-John-Lennon, things-related-to-the-Beatles is only related to things-related-to-John-Lennon!" But that's the fault of the English language. I leave it to the wordsmiths to improve upon my terminology. :P
But what if when you specified a category, if you could say what the relationship was?
That's Wikidata. We're still waiting. I was putting forth an interim solution, adding only one new type of category-inclusion, so that you don't have to explicitly state all sorts of things like transitivity and deal with arbitrary numbers of relations and so forth. To be honest, it probably wouldn't be that much of a time-saver, so there's probably no point in an interim solution.
We just need to get someone to stick to one of the various Wikidata-ish projects and finish it. Hopefully this Semantic MediaWiki business that was just committed as an extension will end up in a state where the WMF is willing to use it.