On 11.08.2016 18:45, Andra Waagmeester wrote:
On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Markus Kroetzsch
<markus.kroetzsch(a)tu-dresden.de <mailto:markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de>>
wrote:
has a statement "population: 20,086 (point in time: 2011)" that is
confirmed by a reference. Nevertheless, the statement is marked as
"deprecated". This would mean that the statement "the popluation was
20,086 in 2011" is wrong. As far as I can tell, this is not the case.
I wouldn't say that with a deprecated rank, that statement is "wrong". I
consider de term deprecated to indicate that a given statement is no
longer valid in the context of a given resource (reference). I agree, in
this specific case the use of the deprecated rank is wrong, since no
references are given to that specific statement.
Nevertheless, I think it is possible to have disagreeing resources on an
identical statement, where two identical statements exists, one with
rank "deprecated" and one with rank "normal". It is up to the user
to
decide which source s/he trusts.
The status "deprecated" is part of the claim of the statement. The
reference is supposed to support this claim, which in this case is also
the claim that it is deprecated. The status is not meant to deprecate a
reference (not saying that this is never useful, potentially, but you
can only use it in one way, and it seems much more practical if
deprecated statements get references that explain why they are deprecated).
It seems that somebody wanted to indicate that this old population
is no longer current. This is achieved not by deprecating the old
value, but by setting another (newer) value as "preferred".
I would argue that this is better done by using qualifiers (e.g. start
data, end data). If a statement on the population size would be set to
preferred, but isn't monitored for quite some time, it can be difficult
to see if the "preferred" statement is still accurate, whereas a
qualifier would give a better indication that that stament might need an
update.
Sure, there should always be qualifiers as needed, and we already have
qualifiers like start and end date in most cases. However, one should
still set the "best" statemnt(s) to be preferred as a help for users of
the data. When you use date in queries or in LUA, it would be very hard
to analyse all statements' qualifiers to find out which one is currently
the best. The "preferred" rank gives a simple shortcut there. In SPARQL,
for example, the best ranked statements will be used in the simplified
"direct" properties in namespace wdt: Users who want to get all the
details can still use the qualifiers, but this leads to more complicated
queries.
Best regards,
Markus
Cheers,
Andra
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