Author: info

Description:
In the mail thread "[Semediawiki-user] Getting the values of a property", ablum wants to list all the *values* of a property. Property:Foo's page normally lists

Pages using the property “Foo”

and for each page displays some of the values of Foo on that page. But:

• The ... elision hides lots of values, which is bad for a property that takes lots of values (e.g. "Employs" or "Has actor")
• The values are spread and repeated among many pages.

So it's very difficult to determine all the values of a property.

It seems a useful enhancement if there was a way to "invert" this to list

Values of the property “Foo”

and for each value display some of the pages with that value of Foo. It could be an optional parameter like ?by_value=1 to Property:Foo.

This would require a new SMWStore method, getAllPropertyValues(), but otherwise could reuse much of the SMWOrderedListPage code.

(There's a separate issue that semantic searches can't make the values of a property into the subjects of a query, so it's difficult for users to make a semantic search that displays a list of values.) A workaround is to populate the "value" pages with the inverse property, and then view the inverse property; but this requires you create a page for every value, and only works for Type:Page.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Property:Has_author#SMWResults