Hi Wikidata people,
We have started to widen our collection of various historical people with various
memberships on our wikibase installation - FactGrid, a "database for historians"
(which should eventually become a source for Wikidata).
This is a typical dataset on a person:
https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/Item:Q84
This one is more complex:
https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/Item:Q1319
I am wondering whether it was clever to put the individual membership in a lodge (or
several lodges) under a wider umbrella of "member of Freemasons". How for
instance can we now ask our query service for a list of all Freemasons plus individual
lodge affiliation.
Question: Is it good to create such subplots with qualifiers? Is it good to do this in the
light of the SPARQL queries we want to run? Is it good with a perspective on the additions
we could perhaps better add if we avoided such subclauses? - like dates of membership in
different lodges? (That seems to be a problem right now...)
We have far more details of membership information (like functions in these societies) and
I feel we can find very different arrangements like
* create qualifiers for a particular membership (member of the Illuminati plus 50
qualifiers of details information...
* create minute and specialised properties for each sort of organisation which are then
offered on one level (a property for membership in the Illuminati, particular property for
the person who proposed the new member, a property for the date of entry, a property for
the first grade, a new property for grade 2 and so on...
* create a branch of new items for membership information sorted by organisation -
something like a membership card for any individual membership in any sort of association.
A person who is member of the Illuminati would then get a new item for his particular
membership with different entries on who brought him into the order? When accepted, when
promoted to which level? where affiliated? What internal positions...
See this blog entry for details we have on any particular Illuminati membership:
https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/47
What kind of mess would we create with membership-items in future SPARQL queries? I feel
dizzy with these questions.
How would you organise such things if you were aiming at a kind of animation, where we
will eventually see how the Illuminati infiltrated lodges?
These are peculiar questions. We could need some advice from people who can already
foresee the SPARQL calamities we are creating with these first data sets - and the
difficulties we are creating for Wikidata as a future user of our research data. So maybe
you can help us with good advice on how to best organise our weird knowledge.
Best,
Olaf
Dr. Olaf Simons
Forschungszentrum Gotha der Universität Erfurt
Schloss Friedenstein, Pagenhaus
99867 Gotha
Büro: +49-361-737-1722
Mobil: +49-179-5196880
Privat: Hauptmarkt 17b/ 99867 Gotha