Re: OnAgainOffAgain relations - beyond celeb marriage: Org membership

This is timely, because we at IPTC have been working on an RDF schema for
sports data, and the idea of Memberships comes up a lot - players being
members of teams, and teams being "members" of leagues.

Obviously players can move about quite a lot, and some can have
simultaneous memberships of more than one team - for example a Premier
League team plus the relevant national team.

We can address this fairly easily with a Membership class with start and
end date properties. Then we can subclass it for specific relationships eg
PlayerTeamMembership.

Perhaps the more generic parent to Membership could be called
TimeBoundRelationship or some similar term? That could cover employment,
marriage, appointments or roles such as captaincies, and probably much
more. (Alternatively a "role" could be a property on the Membership)

A related area that we have been looking at is the idea of players'
names changing - there are some famous examples of NBA players changing
their names multiple times
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metta_Sandiford-Artest#Personal_life> during
their career, for example.  And venues change their name fairly often
<https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/staples-center-sign-removed-from-outside-of-arena-ahead-of-official-name-change-to-crypto-com-arena/>.
Teams have been known to change their names: apparently Utah Jazz used to
be based in New Orleans and that's where the name came from - everyone else
probably knew that already...

But it seems that most representations simply use the "latest" version of
their name, e.g. https://www.nba.com/stats/player/1897/career/ just uses
Metta World Peace's well-known name even for the seasons before he changed
his name. And it seems that athletes who get married and change their names
officially generally keep their original name.

So while a special class to handle time-based names is something that we
could support, the extra complexity of adding date and time ranges to every
query on the data will probably mean that we end up defining this as out of
scope, for now at least.

Brendan.

On Fri, 10 Dec 2021 at 05:06, Anthony Moretti <anthony.moretti@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Agreeing with Dan here, you could argue that any instance of schema:Event
> is also an example.
>
> Taking Simon's example:
> Bob - is captain of - Bowls Club - Jan 1, 2019–Dec 31, 2019
> Bob - is captain of - Bowls Club - Jan 1, 2020–Dec 31, 2020
>
> Seems equivalent to:
>
> schema:Event
> Bob's captaincy of Bowls Club 2019
> startTime: Jan 1, 2019
> endTime: Dec 31, 2019
>
> schema:Event
> Bob's captaincy of Bowls Club 2020
> startTime: Jan 1, 2020
> endTime: Dec 31, 2020
>
> It seems natural to me that every triple should have start and end time
> positions and possibly also a location position. The above examples seem to
> me like different ways of saying the same thing, albeit the first has more
> structure. You could argue that schema:Event is just a convenience type for
> statements with temporal data.
>
> YAGO knowledge base is a good example:
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370212000719
>
> Regards
> Anthony
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 8:20 AM Cox, Simon (L&W, Clayton) <
> Simon.Cox@csiro.au> wrote:
>
>> Captain of the bowls club is another example.
>>
>> (I was in one of these the other day admiring the wooden honour boards –
>> the same names come up repeatedly but not necessary sequentially.)
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com>
>> *Sent:* Thursday, 9 December, 2021 22:57
>> *To:* public-rdf-star@w3.org
>> *Subject:* OnAgainOffAgain relations - beyond celeb marriage: Org
>> membership
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The celebrity re-marriage example is interesting and real, but may look a
>> bit artificial or cornercase. A similarly structured situation is much more
>> common - membership of organizations.
>>
>>
>>
>> For example one organization being a member of another.
>>
>>
>>
>> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q51698517 is the International Fact
>> Checking Network (IFCN). It has a notion of membership grounded in review
>> of members w.r.t. their official principles.
>>
>>
>>
>> Verified signatories are e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30325238
>> (Full Fact). There are some organizations such as Snopes (
>> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2287154) who were once members (verified
>> signatories) but who are not currently.
>>
>>
>>
>> Wikidata uses annotations on a
>> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P463 edge between IFCN and Snopes
>> to give start/end times (
>>
>> 15 April 2017, 5 June 2019). It also points to evidence/source document.
>>
>>
>>
>> As far as I know Snopes have only been members once, but if they were to
>> rejoin it seems Wikidata could accomodate the task of representing this.
>>
>>
>>
>> Until I learn a better name for it that isn't too grandiose, I am calling
>> these "on again, off again" relationships, in honour of the celebrity
>> marriage/divorce usecase.
>>
>>
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>
>>
>> p.s. another example, not quite notable enough for Wikidata to record:
>>
>> I (https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q56641640) have twice been a member
>> of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7552326 (AISB - Society for the Study
>> of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour).  But then I have
>> multiple times lived in the U.K., or been in various restaurants; how do we
>> scope RDF-Star's applicability? Which of these are reasonable places it
>> could be used for time-scoped relationships?
>>
>>
>>
>