User talk:TimK MSI

It looks like you've started populating Level 3 and 4 ecoregions from EPA/Omernik. Thanks for doing that. My lab uses these and other ecoregion constructs in biogeographic analysis, and I think WikiData might provide us with a reasonable persistent identification and linked data platform to rally around. I'd like to get the rest of those populated in WikiData following the same pattern you've set, which I think makes sense. I've also looked into populating boundary data via Wikimedia as there is no one really authoritative source for the geospatial side of that, which is both stable and programmable. I'm wondering why you stopped creating those items or if you still had things in progress. I plan to write some code for building out the rest of the items derived from the published EPA source, and I'll post that somewhere on GitHub as a reference. Please let me know what your plans are and if you have any issues with me going ahead. --Skybristol (talk) 22:34, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Skybristol: Greetings and thanks for the message. I've been hand-entering these items as time permits, but I don't have plans (or means) to build out the entire network. I'd be delighted to see the rest created programmatically! Boundary data would be awesome, too. If your process creates duplicate items of any ecoregions I've put in, I'm happy to help watch for those and merge them. (It's possible that creating dupes and merging my relatively small number of hand-entered items would be more efficient than trying to work around the existing items?)

My work on this has mostly been a personal proof-of-concept. I'm glad to hear it might have helped demonstrate Wikidata could be a useful home for identifying and describing these ecoregions. Thanks--TimK MSI (talk) 23:21, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Great! I'm about done with the code, and dealing with the items already in WikiData won't be a problem. I have been doing a little housekeeping on the existing Level III and Level IV items to bring those into semantic alignment with WikiData's conventions. I went ahead and pulled all level 1-4 ecoregions for North America and CONUS and will be getting those all into the system and appropriately linked. It looks like you defined the Level 3 and Level 4 items as North America, though I see that you've been using the US_L3CODE values. We can use the same Level 3 item as the class for both NA and CONUS items, but I think what we need to do there is go through the process of creating new identifier properties for each of the specific identifiers that will be associated with these items (NA L1-3 and CONUS L3-4). That will let us get them into their proper place in the model (instead of the ordinal idea you used), making it easy to link WikiData IDS from any system that's using the ecoregion IDs. I haven't set up properties yet in WikiData, so that will be a learning experience for me.

I am also running spatial intersect processes to identify all relevant linkages to states/provinces in CA, US, and MX, which will be useful to connect for some analytical and reporting purposes that we use in my lab. I'll also run US counties against CONUS Level 4 ecoregions, though that's not a level we get down to. And I can imagine running other spatial areas of interest through such as Native America/First Nations lands, which would be of interest in some of our work.

The work that User:PKM (is that you as well) did in identifying other WikiData items that are partially coincident with Colorado Plateau and Columbia Plateau is really cool and something that would be great to work out for these after the fact. If everything was modeled semantically the same way, we could probably automate those connection to physiographic features of the same general name, but things are a bit too messy for that just yet, I think.

Thanks again for starting this and accepting my contributions. I'll let you know as I start pushing actual items into the live system. --Skybristol (talk) 15:08, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello TimK MSI,

Really sorry for the inconvenience. This is a gentle note to request that you check your email. We sent you a message titled "The Community Insights survey is coming!". If you have questions, email surveys@wikimedia.org.

You can see my explanation here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:46, 25 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello –

This edit to "clonal colony" (Q611804) was in error. The properties instance of (P31) and subclass of (P279) define key ontological relationships. Because subclass of (P279) is transitive, such errors lead to numerous false inferences, such as clonal colony (Q611804)subclass of (P279)process (Q3249551). Before you use these properties, please look at the object item to be sure it's the one you intend. You can also review the usage instructions on these two properties, and Help:Basic membership properties. (In particular, note that "A" is only a subclass of "B" if all instances of "A" are also instances of "B".) There is often another property better suited to expressing the relationship you had in mind; you can search for one here. In this case, studied in (P2579) works better. Thanks! Swpb (talk) 20:38, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]