On 29/07/05, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Because it is important to know for a noun what
its gender is.
Sorry if I've not been following UW discussions, but the gender of
words can and have changed over time. How will UW address this?
Can I, for example, indicate that a certain word had a male gender
in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, but neuter in the 20th? And that
in 1890-1920 the percentage of people who used male or neuter
gradually shifted?
In a Wikipedia or Wiktionary article, these complex relations and
exceptional cases can be described in plain text, as I did in the
previous paragraph. But how do you express them in a relational
database schema?
And what if you discover such complex relations as the project
develops, what is the UW strategy for modifying the schema over
time? Right now you seem to be designing an "ultimate" schema
that will then be frozen and kept static for all time. The very
name of the UW project suggests this kind of thinking, and to me
that is about as foreign as marxism.
As was done with WM 1.4 to 1.5, some very complex queries - and a lot
of processing time :) - would be needed to change the database design.
Therefore it would be undertaken with care and, well, it can't really
be planned for.