Editing User:Reversedragon/SignEntityProposal (section)

== Data model ==

A Sign Entity resembles a Wikibase Item with the capacity for representing figurative symbols. It has a main body much like a regular Wikibase Item, a conceptual area of Fragment sub-Entities which represent small-scale variations in form, and a conceptual area of meaning sub-Entities which represent literal or figurative assigned meanings. In concept, it should not be assumed that any particular Sign Entity will actually use all three of these fields. Many Sign Entities may be used for completely literal concepts which only "figuratively" refer to themselves, and many Sign Entities will have only one variation such that they will not need Fragments. This will already sound perfectly logical when assuming that Signs which do not have Fragments will have meanings, or Signs which do not have meanings will have Fragments. However, Sign Entities are also allowed to have neither any meanings nor any Fragments. In this case, a Sign Entity is representing something strictly and completely literal which is not meant to refer to anything else, exactly as it would if it had a meaning referring to itself. This characteristic of the Sign Entity is a concession to the fact that in terms of the linguistic definition of <i>sign</i>, all digitally-encoded Entities are themselves technically signs rather than the literal real-world concepts they model; as models of reality, or of some particular fictional reality, all Entities potentially include errors with respect to their correspondence to the relationships existing within a particular defined reality (observed or defined Facticity). As such, it fundamentally makes sense to give all concepts in an ontology the ability to be changed from figurative to literal or from literal to figurative depending on how well they are found to properly correspond to a given defined reality. If, in a hypothetical scenario, people believed in the existence of luminiferous ether into the age of digital ontologies, this concept might be encoded as a literal Entity one day, but the day this model was falsified, whoever was maintaining the ontology would want to take the same Entity and reassign it as a figurative concept with a meaning of being a falsified model of what it models. Equally, if people were convinced string theory was impossible, but experiments showed a string theory equation to be correct, it would be important to update the ontology from having one meaning of the equation literally referring to itself to having two meanings of referring to itself or referring to the real-world process it accurately models. <del>In other areas of knowledge, such as religion or poetry, all Signs would be assumed to be figurative and the purpose of the meanings area would be to separate different meanings of the same sign</del>

...wait, what about S2 statements. S2 statements are supposed to represent specific models of objects or signifiers put together a specific way, so that a model from mainstream Marxism-Leninism stands separate from a model from Trotskyism stands separate from a model from Christianity from Buddhism from Hinduism. do we really need the meanings field when there are S2 statements?? that is a conundrum

<pre>
@base         <https://research.moraleconomy.au/entity/> .
@prefix rdf:  <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix dct:  <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix ontolex:   <http://www.w3.org/ns/lemon/ontolex#> .
@prefix wikibase:  <http://wikiba.se/ontology#> .
@prefix seaturtle: <https://research.moraleconomy.au/seaturtle/ontology#> .
@prefix wdt:  <https://research.moraleconomy.au/prop/direct/> .

<S14>
 rdf:type  seaturtle:Sign, skos:Concept, ontolex:LexicalEntry ;  # the Entity is a Sign, and the Sign can have meanings
 # "pre-iconographical": dishes.
 seaturtle:dimension  <S3000>;  # S0 Item - data structure or conceptual division
   # literalness/countability of the concept - Z, S0, S1, S2, etc, as defined on Wikibase instance
 rdfs:label  "countable philosophy"@en ;
 rdfs:member <S14-F1>, <S14-F2>, <S14-A1> .  # list of Fragments and Associations
 skos:narrower <S14-F1>, <S14-F2> .
 ontolex:denotes <S14-F1>, <S14-F2> .  # S14 "literally means" Fragment F1 or F2
   # if there are no Fragments, generate a Fragment F0 which links the Sign Entity back to itself, but don't do this to skos:narrower
 ontolex:evokes  <S14-A1> .
   # clarification that Associations are meanings - :evokes is to be used for word connotations, etc.
 # in SeaTurtle all three lists would be inferred from the presence of the form blocks

<S14-F1>
 rdf:type  seaturtle:Fragment, ontolex:LexicalSense ;
 skos:broader <S14> ;
 # "pre-iconographical": red dishes.
 rdfs:label  "countable philosophical framework"@en .

<S14-F2>
 rdf:type  seaturtle:Fragment, ontolex:LexicalSense ;
 skos:broader <S14> ;
 # "pre-iconographical": blue dishes.
 rdfs:label  "countable ideology"@en .

<S14-A1>
 rdf:type  seaturtle:Association, wikibase:Sense, ontolex:LexicalConcept ;
 # "iconological": the emotional significance of dishes.
 rdfs:label  "literal"@en .
</pre>