Discussions on City/Town

Do you have a specific use case in mind? I'm hesitant to add this property to City/Town, because a lot of cities don't have their own newspapers, and a lot of newspapers are regional (Contra Costa Times for Contra Costa County, CA, for example). Is the idea just to be able to see what newspapers cover a specific city locally? Or are you specifically wanting to know what newspapers are based in a given city?

Very specifically, I wanted to ask, "What are the websites of the newspapers in the 3 cities neighboring the Federation of Damanhur?"

Of your two options, if I had to pick one, I would ask, "What newspapers cover a specific city locally?"

For Turin, (for example,) according to Wikipedia, the newspapers are: La Stampa, Tuttosport, and the Turin Metro.

I think a property for "areas covered locally" or something similar would be the best way to capture this. Of course, the trick is then getting the data.

Good catch. The "founded" property on City/Town is an older property. "Date founded" is actually on a supporting type called "dated location", which we created to be used with many different types, including City/Town, Administrative division, and Country. But we forgot to get rid of the old property on City/Town. I'll open a bug to address this. Thanks!

Actually, city/town has an included type called 'location' which has a property called 'contained by' that will hold the country information. This may seem overly abstract, but it is a general model that works well for locations of any type -- if 'country' was added to city/town, it would likely show up twice which would be redundant and might be confusing.

I do notice that St. Petersburg isn't typed as a location - which it should be.

I still believe we need a "Country" field. A Location can be "contained by" many things - a region, an administrative division, a sub-urban area, county, province, a national park, a postal district. But one thing is common to all Towns - they all exist within a Country. There might be several levels of "contained within" between Country and Town - but "what country is this town in" is a regular question and it's a solid principle of database design to de-normalise the structure of the database intelligently away from the purely abstract and "perfectly non-redundant" model to allow for actual "USEFULNESS" (anyone heard of this concept?!) and performance of the data! Country field please!

I hear you on usefulness... there are definitely trade-offs being made in this model. Hope we can get you an answer to your query question on the data modeling mailing list soon.

For parks, you can enter the city in the "contained by" property. For schools, you have to fill in the address property. (If you don't know the full address, it's OK to just put in the city -- it's more information than we currently have, and someone else can always add more information later.)

The contains property is pretty unconstrained -- anything that can be considered a location is fair game. So New York City can contain not only The Bronx and Harlem, but also Central Park and Todt Hill (the highest point in NYC). The "neighborhood" type already exists, although it's pretty empty right now.

totally agree

I agree. I've made it so you can have multiple populations.

You made City Population have multiple values to track changes over time. Why does not the same argument apply to Country Population which is still single valued?

The same argument does indeed apply; thanks for catching it. All three population properties (on citytown, country, and administrative_division) now accept multiple values.