On Thursday 06 April 2006 20:47, HumanCell .org wrote:
On 06/04/06, Rick DeNatale
<rick.denatale(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[[Category:MyCategory|MySortKey|DisplayThisInstead]]
which would be consistent with the way pipes are used to parameterize
Image links e.g. [[Image:MyImage|thumb|Cool caption]]
It would also have the benefit of not breaking existing pages which
don't use this new syntax.
Yes, I agree that is a clear advantage - don't want to go breaking
existing pages.
On the other hand allowing alternate
presentations of category links
raises some consistency issues that might make it inadvisable.
Well I'd rather not, but here's why I think it is necessary... and if
anyone can think of a better way of doing the following I'd be
grateful if you could let me know.
- I have a database of 10,000+ chemical compounds and would like one
article per compound.
- Compounds are related hierarchically e.g. "methane" is an "organic
compound" which in turn is a "molecular entitity" (cf
taxonomy/ontology)
- Compounds can have ugly names like
"(+)-cis-3,4-dihydrophenanthrene-3,4-diol"
Current approach:
- each compound is a category with three parts:
1) a definition of the compound and its properties
2) a list of sub-categories
3) links to super-categories
- make the article title a unique identifier (e.g. CHEBI15386) to
avoid the ugly punctuation
- make category links meaningful to users
[[Category:CHEBI15836|Organic aromatic compounds]] replaces the ID
with more meaningful text
Any thoughts? Are the issues just specific to my case or are there
more general issues at stake?
Cheers.
PS. Just found Semantic MediaWiki which looks very interesting.
Yes, this could indeed be a nice use case for this extension. It gives you
some more freedom for describing relationships between your articles, and
maybe there are also other properties that one could associate with some
compounds (e.g. molecular mass).
If the taxonomy is all that you need, categories could also be a sufficient
solution -- the displayed article names really seem to be your only problem
here. Would it help to create redirects between articles with nice names and
articles with ugly names (note that you would also have to use "plus" for
"+"
etc.)? If the category mechanism is used only for browsing, then this might
already suffice.
--
Markus Krötzsch
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe
mak(a)aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de phone +49 (0)721 608 7362
www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/ fax +49 (0)721 693 717