[WikiEN-l] Types of categories

Wed Jun 7 19:10:24 UTC 2006

Roger Luethi wrote:

>On Sun, 04 Jun 2006 11:31:02 -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>  
>
>>Once the software is written to compute intersections of categories
>>within the Mediawiki software, it would be relatively simple to
>>recategorize the articles into their parent categories, such that no
>>information was lost.  The way this would be done is that all articles
>>in a subcategory which had multiple parent attribute categories would
>>be automatically moved into the parent categories.  This would be
>>repeated until no such situations continued to exist.  The ad-hoc
>>structure could still be kept, but it could be calculated on the fly
>>(along with new types of intersections which could be easily added).
>>    
>>
>So instead of in the category "Bridges in France", the "Pont du Gard" would 
>now be in the categories "Bridges" and "France"!?
>
There's no benefit from this unless we have a good search system.

>>(Now that I do this on an example, I see that this algorithm would
>>probably have to be tweaked to deal with subcatgories of
>>[[Category:Categories by topic]], but that's not too bad.)
>>    
>>
>I suspect there are more corner cases than we imagine.
>
Absolutely. See 
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Semantic_relations , and this 
could be taken even further.

>>>For instance, how do you connect the districts of Paris to the category
>>>Paris? What is a subset of the parent attribute "Paris": "Districts of
>>>Paris", or "Quartier Latin", or neither? Does it bother you if the article
>>>on a French district is now in a subcategory of "Capitals in Europe"?
>>>      
>>>
>>[[Category:Paris]] is a theme, not an attribute, so [[Category:Paris]]
>>should not be a subcategory of [[Category:Capitals in Europe]].
>>    
>>
>One problem I'm seeing here is that your proposal focuses on one single
>type of hierarchies. Paris, France, Europe are now all themes. So if I
>ask for an intersection of categories "Bridges" and "France", the results
>include bridges that for any reason are related to the "France" theme.
>There is no way to ask for Bridges in France, or Paris.
>
>One solution would be to create "is part of" or "is in" categories in
>addition to the "is a" categories. Then you can have a hierarchy with "Pont
>du Gard" -> "France" -> "Europe", or "cylinder" -> "engine" -> "car".
>
>We'd have two indepent types of categories, plus a third, the catch-all
>"theme".
>
That still doesn't disambiguate "cylinder" -> "geometric solid", or 
"engine" -> "aircraft", or "engine" -> "railway"

Ec