On 4/30/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
In my work I have access to a database of thousands of case studies of persons who have been formally treated for various psychosocial disorders. The information does not include personal identification materials, just age, gender and other demographics, plus their diagnosis, course of treatment and outcome.
In each record there is a list of identifying codes. If the person's primary diagnosis was chemical dependency, the (main) code for this is entered; if that person's primary chemical of use was cocaine, the (sub) code for this is also entered, etc.
Now, if I want to call up all cases of chemical dependency, I enter its code and I have a list of these cases to study. If I want only those cases where the primary chemical of use was cocaine, I would enter that code. For this to work, BOTH the main and sub codes must be entered in each case.
This is what I am asking for in WP. That is why both the main and sub categories need to be entered into each Article.
on 4/30/07 10:44 AM, Tracy Poff at tracy.poff@gmail.com wrote:
But this may not be the best way to do things. Consider the following two categories:
Continents> Continents>Europe>England>People from England>Musicians from England>Heavy metal guitarists from the England
If we did as you say, this would place Jimmy Page, the guitarist from Led Zeppelin, in the same category as Africa. Is that useful?
Imagine if I wanted to find all of the musical groups except for folk music groups. In order to do this, I would need some way of performing unions on the subcategories of "Musical groups by genre" (or whatever it is called). If I could do this, there would be no need to place the articles in subcategories and parent categories. So, the only purpose that would really be served by doing this is finding all articles anywhere below a given category in the tree. However, this would be served equally by a union function, which would be useful for other applications as well. Doing as you say would make it impossible to distinguish Jimmy Page from Europe without having the extra union/intersection functionality as well.
The best solution, in my opinion, would be to implement unions and intersections, using which we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. Placing articles in both subcategories and parent categories, though, would be less than useful.
Tracy,
Your point is very well made. The difference I see in our searches is that you want to exclude a certain set of data, and mine is geared toward including a certain set of data.
This may very well be a matter of software, which is an area I know absolutely nothing about. My solution of including both main & sub categories in the same Article is based on what I understand about the process - which is about as elementary as it gets. In fact, I am open to any solution that meets the needs I cited above.
Marc