Wikidata:Requests for comment/Extending P710 "participant" to cover all event roles

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We are addressing the problem of semantic roles in events. All events/actions have participants/roles, for example, eating does not exist without an eater and eaten, communication always involves a communicator, a message and a recipient. These are language-independent semantic roles. Currently, Wikidata uses a variety of properties to represent event roles, including some fairly general ones such as practiced by (P3095), participant (P710), uses (P2283) and many event-specific ones such as perpetrator (P8031) and victim(s) (P8032). Currently, Wikidata property related to events (Q22964785) has 61 instances which may or may not include all of the properties used for event roles. It seems that such properties were added as needed without an overall schema. Many event types such as lecture (Q603773) or music competition (Q1955280) do not mention any roles at all.

Since adding properties to Wikidata requires extensive discussion, it does not seem reasonable to use properties to represent a potentially open-ended set of event roles. For example, an event representing a chemical reaction may have several specialized roles for various ingredients. We may not want to add new properties for such roles. It is also highly unlikely that Wikidata users would agree on a finite property ontology to represent all event roles.

We proposed to solve this problem by adding a single property "event role". When to subject of this property is an event type, its object is a Q item describing the role. For example, assassination (Q3882219) would have two statements:

assassination (Q3882219)event roleassassin (Q55983771)

assassination (Q3882219)event rolevictim (Q1851760)

For many event types such role items do not exist and have to be created.

When the subject of the "event role" property is an event instance, such as assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Q1025404), the object of the property is the actual entity that played that role with an object of statement has role (P3831) qualifier:

assassination (Q3882219)event roleJohn Wilkes Booth (Q180914)object of statement has role (P3831)assassin (Q55983771)

assassination (Q3882219)event roleAbraham Lincoln (Q91)object of statement has role (P3831)victim (Q1851760)

We are proposing to use the existing property qualifier object of statement has role (P3831) to indicate the role played by the object of the "event role" property.

There is an existing Wikidata property participant (P710) which comes tantalizingly close to what we want to achieve with "event role". It is described as:

"person, group of people or organization (object) that actively takes/took part in an event or process (subject)"

This description only includes people or groups of people, while we need to include all sorts of entities. On the other hand, the Wikidata item for this property participant (Q56512863) is described as:

"person or object that takes part in an event or process"

which is exactly what we have in mind for "event role".

The question for this discussion is:

Should we extend the definition of participant (P710) to include all types of entities making it consistent with its corresponding Wikidata item participant (Q56512863)?

If we do this extension, we can use participant (P710) as "event role" and will not need to add any new properties.

An additional question for this discussion is:

Should we use the extended version of participant (P710) only with event instance and use "event role" with event types? Is this distinction between event types and instances important, since some events are both types and instances?

Anatole Gershman (talk) 22:40, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Broadening participant (P710) seems better than a new property that would complete with it. Vicarage (talk) 22:51, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
 Oppose The term "event role" is one that presupposes that a lot of things that aren't subclasses of anything that's called an event is an event. If we look at assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Q1025404) we currently already have perpetrator (P8031) and victim(s) (P8032) that work perfectly fine for the purpose.
The description of assassin (Q55983771) currently says "someone who intentionally kills a public or political figure". This implies that people who aren't public or political figures that are killed aren't killed by an assassin (Q55983771). Of course, not everyone who enters claims will be conscious of it. That makes writting queries a lot harder than using standardized categories like perpetrator (P8031). Standardizing terms via the property proposal takes effort but that effort is worth it and this attempt to circumvent it should be opposed. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 10:53, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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