How to design a Semantic Wiki to best understand the concept of Time

From semantic-mediawiki.org

My example would be something like the Land Area of Serbia over time. It gets confusing when you add in the concept of Successor States etc but I'm trying to test my understanding of the Semantic Concept through various challenging scenarios.

What would be the ideal way to design the ontology so that I can do a query on different dates for the total Land Area say in 1990, 2005, 2010, 2013.

The last time I used Semantic Wiki was a few years ago but I ended up making the Wiki too confusing and unable to adapt to changes in time without losing previous information. Ie in 2008 Kosovo declared independence so pre 2008 the query should respond with the land area of Serbia+Kosovo but post 2008 it should respond with just the land area of Serbia.

To make it even more complicated, how do you then take in the concept of sovereignity recognition? For example the above scenario is valid for a person from the UK (me) as the UK has full diplomatic recognition of Kosovo, but Spain for example does not. So if I ran the query above but from the viewpoint of Spain then post 2008 it would respond with the land area of Serbia+Kosovo.

Best Regards,

Adam

22:55, 24 July 2013

I have pondered on similar subject in the course of designing Summary II. Storing historical data can be done with subobjects. They can be organised to store pages' properties together with context: time when valid, viewpoint etc.

Another theoretically possible but impractical solution is completely rewriting Semantic MediaWiki to allow, in addition to existing statements of the page.property = value form, something like page.propertyvalue, page.property (was equal in 1913) value, page.property (some people say equals) value, etc.

05:43, 25 July 2013
 

What you're talking about at the end is, essentially, three-dimensional data: land area for country, for year, for viewpoint. SMW can only handle up to two-dimensional data per page, using the #subobject function. (Or you could use the Semantic Internal Objects extension, which does the same thing but with different syntax.) You could still store three-dimensional data, but you would need to use different pages for it: instead of just a page called "Kosovo", you would need pages like "Kosovo/2008" or "Kosovo/for Spain", or even "Kosovo/2008/for Spain". However, for your case you would presumably want the system to find the nearest year and that sort of thing, not just an exact year match; and I don't think there's any way to do that. So if you really wanted to get this working, you would have to create a page or subobject for every year and maybe even every viewpoint, even though it would involved a tremendous amount of redundancy.

13:43, 25 July 2013
What you're talking about at the end is, essentially, three-dimensional data: land area for country, for year, for viewpoint. 
Not really. I mean that the metaproperties for context (time and viewpoint) should be included in the same subobject as the properties. This allows any number of dimensions.
you would presumably want the system to find the nearest year 
I can record intervals: '''Kosovo''' ... {{#subobject:__since = 2008|__until = 2015|__who thinks so = Spain|legal status = Independent state}}.
14:48, 25 July 2013

Ah, yes, that's true. It would be somewhat awkward, but doable.

18:05, 25 July 2013