Discussions on Embassies and consulates
Start a New Discussion
-
-
I just took the new Embassy type for a spin and it looks really good. I had been thinking about adding a CVT for ambassadors tenures to my old type but I never got around to it. The only small issue that I can see is that it might overlap with the Government Position Held CVT in the Politician type but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
-
Funny, I had just emailed skud about that very question. The only real denormalizations are the date values. I'm leaning toward the idea that ambassadors could be both Politicians and Ambassadors, and have the appointment info in one property, and the country info in another. (Although the country info is slightly denormalized in the name of Government Office or Title topic (US Ambassador to France, Russian Ambassador to New Guinea, etc.)) But I'm not entirely sure yet.
-
Jeff, I think Kirrily is modeling the fact that an ambassador can represent more than one country concurrently during their tenure. I'm not sure how often this occurs but it is possible.
The simplest option that I see is that we could just write a help topic that explains to new users that the Ambassador type stores ambassador's assignments and that the Politician type stores all the other positions held.
A more aggressive choice would be to move the Government Position Held CVT out of the Politician type and into more specific types for Ambassador, Senator, Congress Member, Head of State etc.
-
Just FYI... Something else to note is that one person can simultaneously be an ambassador to many places. I forget where I saw this, but I think that eg. New Zealand only has a couple of ambassadors to African countries; there's one based in maybe Kenya who is the ambassador to most of East Africa, and another based in maybe Ghana who is ambassador to most of West Africa. So that's why I separated "attached to embassy" and "to country".
-
I think Kirrily is modeling the fact that ambassadors can be ambassador to multiple countries simultaneously, not that they can represent multiple countries.
I'd rather go with the documentation solution than try to split Politician into n number of types, and accept that, in some cases, the ambassadorship will be duplicated, particularly in cases where people are interested in the appointers.
-
One more thought about a slightly different area: Embassy has properties for the To and From counties, Ambassadors, and Address. Are we trying to model the institution of the embassy, or the physical location of the embassy? If we're only interested in contemporary data, location might be OK. But once we start typing Benjamin Franklin as an ambassador, there's no really good way to indicate that he was the United States' ambassador to Sweden and France, since it might be hard to determine what (physical) embassy he was attached to. Should we just change the property to "current address", and say that we're modeling the institution?
Along these lines, it would be nice to split topics like Embassy of Angola in Ottawa, which conflate the embassy with the building it currently resides in ("Panet House"). This is obviously a carry-over from Wikipedia, but it would be good to decide how we want to do this at the outset.
-
For me, the main purpose of modeling embassies is to capture the information about the physical building itself. If the phyical location of the embassy changes over time I guess we could make the street address a dated CVT.
-
What if the job title property in Government Position Held was changed to an enumeration to prevent users from adding ambassador's tenures as a position held? I think we could reasonable enumerate all posible political job titles as long as they don't include the jurisdiction in the title (ie. President of Iran).
-
When you say "information about the physical building", are you talking about "where can I find this on a map" sort of information, or "how old is the building" type of information? If the former, are you interested in historic data as well? Because if not, a simple "current address" should suffice. If the former, but you do need historic info, that would get trickier because the client can't currently handle CVTs that link to other CVTs (i.e., a CVT that had From and To dates plus linked to Mailing Address). If, however, you're interested in the "how old is the building" sort of info, we need to look at something else.
Re enumerating Governmnet Office or Title, the model really does expect the jurisdiction to be part of the title, so enumerating that wouldn't work so well. I'm becoming more inclined to allow for the minor denormalization of entering the ambassadorship twice.
-
I'm mostly talking about "where can i find this on a map". The historical data isn't really important to me but I imagine it would be valuable to other users. I agree that we should probably just go with duplicate data for now at least until someone with more involved use cases comes along.
-
