On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:14:46AM -0400, IvorW wrote:
... Suppose we have a contributor called Victoria,
working on the guide.
Does she have to share her home node with the description of the place of
the same name? ... I think we need a metadata field called node type.
Personally speaking, I'm wary of adding complexity of this kind, and I think
node names should be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. In
exceptional cases, such as your example, the user might have to yield their
name. I think accurate naming will generally stave off name conflicts, and
we won't have to take the Wikipedia approach of "disambiguation"
(see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria ).
I think the existing category system does this already.
Note: a place has a pinpoint location, whereas a
locale has an area.
There are lots of meanings for "place", unfortunately. A certain stretch of
pavement, a restaurant, a tunnel under the river. I'd hesitate to try and
define it too narrowly in terms of a pinpoint location. (A shop might have
one - but what about a sprawling market?)
If we put this in place, we could have different
templates for each node
type. Also, we could distinguish between Victoria(Place) and
Victoria(Person).
In theory, different templates for different things could be cool. I think
the category system as it stands could be used to accomplish that, though,
rather than adding another layer to the system.
--
Earle Martin
hex on
irc.perl.org
http://purl.oclc.org/net/earlemartin/