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title Qualifiers and References
description How NeoWiki models Wikibase-style qualifiers, references, and rank with Subjects, Relations, and Schemas.
order 2

Qualifiers and References

NeoWiki Statements have no qualifiers, references, or rank, unlike Wikibase Statements. A Statement is flat: one property and its Value, with no inner structure. You express qualified and referenced data by reifying it — the value that needs context becomes its own Subject with its own Schema, linked from the main Subject by a Relation. A page can hold any number of Subjects (ADR 7), so this adds Subjects, not a page per value.

NeoWiki is a Property Graph: Subjects are nodes with typed properties and Relations are edges that also carry properties.

For the underlying concepts (Subject, Statement, Relation, Schema), see the Glossary.

Qualifying a value: model it as its own Subject

Promoting a value into its own Subject is the same move as a Semantic MediaWiki subobject, except the intermediate node has a Schema.

Take a museum's yearly attendance. Define an Attendance Schema and link one Attendance Subject per year:

Museum Schema
  Attendance figures: relation → Attendance (multiple)

Attendance Schema
  Year:     number
  Visitors: number
  Source:   url

Each Attendance Subject ({ Year: 2024, Visitors: 2500000, Source: "https://…" }) holds what Wikibase would put as a qualifier (Year) and a reference (Source) on one population Statement. Here they are typed properties governed by the Attendance Schema, so they validate and render like any other data. A linked Subject can link to further Subjects, with no depth limit.

The Attendance Subjects can live on their own pages or as Child Subjects on the museum's page. The Subject Format shows the same pattern in JSON.

Qualifying a relationship: relation properties

When what needs qualifying is the link between two Subjects, the Relation carries the qualifier. A Has CEO Relation to a Person holds role and since as its own properties:

Company Schema
  Has CEO: relation → Person

Relation properties are free-form key/values on the Relation; unlike a linked Subject's properties they are not declared in a Schema and not validated.

This is the closest analogue of a Wikibase qualifier. Each Relation has a stable ID (ADR 10), so an individual relationship is addressable where a Statement is not.

References

A reference is provenance, modelled as an ordinary property: add a Source (or similar) property to the linked Subject's Schema, or put one on the Relation.

Rank

NeoWiki has no rank. What rank encodes is ordinary data: model it explicitly — typically a date property for current vs. historical values, or a status property for deprecated ones.

Mapping from Wikibase

Wikibase NeoWiki
Statement A Subject's Statement (property + value), or a Relation
Qualifier on a literal value A property on a linked Subject (reify the value)
Qualifier on a relationship A property on the Relation
Reference An ordinary property (e.g. Source) on the linked Subject or Relation
Rank No equivalent; model explicitly (dated Subjects, status properties)
Statement ID Statements have none; Subjects and Relations both have stable IDs
novalue / somevalue No equivalent

In RDF

A qualified value round-trips without loss: a linked Subject is its own resource, and a Relation keeps its ID and its properties (Graph Model). See RDF Export for the native projection and Ontology Mapping for projecting into standard ontologies such as EDM.

Presentation

How a property renders is set by Display Attributes and Layouts, not by fields on the Statement.

Further reading