Forum:SMW Property naming conventions

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SMW Property naming conventions

We by now have several Semantic Mediawiki properties, and the list grows almost every day. It gets difficult to keep track of what properties exist, and I have often found myself with the dreaded "no results" screen only to find I had mistyped or misremembered the property name.

As can be seen from the list of all properties, we have several naming conventions regarding wording and capitalization (part of which is caused by me). - -- RagCall (talk) 08:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Status Quo: Wording

The following competing nomenclature conventions exist:

• starts with "Has <noun>"
• starts with "Is... ", which sometimes means a yes/no value (Property:Is retired, Property:Is Exceptional Story), and sometimes another kind of connection (Property:Is in market)
• starts with another verb (Property:Equips in slot)
• starts with a gerund (Property:Bought for)
• is a noun itself (e.g. Property:Market, Property:ID)
• is some other grammatical construction (Property:Against, Property:Move to)

-- RagCall (talk) 08:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Status Quo: Capitalization

Some properties are completely lowercased, while others use Fallen London Noun Title Capitalization (such as Property:Increase Type, Property:Has Game Type). -- RagCall (talk) 08:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Going forward

I am fine with almost all variations, just would like to have some standards. For example, we might consider supporting all kinds of wordings and creating redirects. I would like to use this space to exchange pros and contras of different approaches. -- RagCall (talk) 08:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Semantic Mediawiki itself has guidance on Property naming. There's no reason we need to stick with it, but at the least it's a starting point.

Their suggestion is that Page - Property - Object form a natural-language sentence, meaning the Property is a verb phrase with lower case. Absent other considerations, I think it's reasonable advice to follow. "Make a sentence" is a clear guideline that still allows flexibility.

For my own properties, I've tried to make them verb phrases, although looking back on them I think I lost the forest for the trees to some extent because they're verb phrases that don't naturally form the middle of a sentence. It's natural to say an action Gains::Ray-Drenched Cinder, and Loses::Favours: Revolutionaries. Less so that Tatterskin shawl Equips in slot::Clothing. The object "clothing" wants to go before the word "slot" which is part of the verb phrase. Might have been better as "Equips into"?

Trying to word properties as verb phrases is where a lot of the "have" and "is" prefixes come from. I got tired of saying "is" so much, which is the origin of properties like Located in and Bought for (are those gerunds, or participles?). While it diverges from SMW's advice, I personally think it's worth the trouble. For one thing, the autocomplete for "Property:Has" is rather cluttered.

For properties which are intended as fields of records, I have tended not to make those free-standing verb phrases. For one it gets verbose, and for another they'll never appear on their own. I'm fine with those being single-word adjectives. As an example, Has challenge has fields Against and Difficulty; both of these can sensibly complete the verb phrase, i.e. it makes sense to say an action has challenge against a quality, or that an action challenge difficulty 100. (Property:Uses does not follow this guidance.)

I suppose if we want to do some clean-up by redirecting properties and fixing up Templates, that's a feasible project now and would only get more difficult as time goes on. I'm ok with redirects for aliases, but I worry that if we have too many then it will get hard to navigate the list of properties. The broader issue of "how do I find what Property has the data I'm interested in," I think the solution would be to have a Data Dictionary. Which we basically do already with Fallen London Wiki:Semantic Mediawiki/Data Model. It's even mostly up-to-date.

- PSGarak (talk) 17:06, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Re: "Property:Uses does not follow this guidance." I have introduced the alias Property:Use attribute for Property:Uses to somewhat improve the situation. -- RagCall (talk) 13:53, 2 April 2022 (UTC)