When is a Chinese supermarket not Chinese?

Have you ever wondered what 'Australian' really means?

That's exactly what we've been doing here at True Knowledge.  We're creating new objects based on Wikipedia pages and we want to add as many facts about the new objects as possible.  The Wikipedians have kindly put everything into categories such as 'Australian bands', 'African cuisine' etc, and we've been figuring out the best way to handle this perceived nationality.

Let's start with mountains.  Defining an Australian mountain is easy - if the mountain is located within Australia, then it's an Australian mountain.  But of course we can't generalise that to other classes.  If I go on holiday to Australia then I'm physically located there, but it doesn't make me an Australian, because I wasn't born there and I don't have Australian nationality or ancestry.  So that gives us a few ways to define Australianess in different contexts - location, birth, blood and nationality.

What about businesses?  If a business has it's headquarters in Sydney then it's obviously Australian, but so is one that operates only there but is based offshore in the Cayman Islands.  A Polish man operating a single-person plumbing business in England is obviously a Polish plumber, so maybe we should say that his company is both a Polish plumbing business and an English one.  A 'Chinese supermarket' is one that sells ingredients for Chinese recipes, so if some brothers were born in Brazil, grew up in France, then took over a Chinese supermarket in California, then do we describe the business as Californian, Chinese, French, Brazilian or some combination of the above?

This was all getting a bit complicated, and we didn't want the user to be faced with too many choices to disambiguate between if they asked a question, so we decided to do it like this:

We use a very general attribute "Australian, is pertaining to the Commonwealth of Australia" which can be inferred in a number of ways. This allows us give you a simple answer and show exactly what we meant by "Yes" in an explanation underneath.  We'll be releasing this feature later this week after a bit more testing.

Recently I said that that we'd be getting the question "Who is the president of the smallest republic in the world?" working.  This new feature will allow to confirm that he is definitely a Nauruan!

Comments

[ASh]

Just seen the feature BBC News had to check out what you guys are doing, all I say is Good Work...

[OJ]

That's all very well, but the fact is there is no single answer to questions of national identity. Would it not be better to answer 'x was born in this country, was eductated in that one and holds passports of x, y & z' rather than attempt to give a 'yes' or 'no'?

[Beth]

That sort of long answer might be useful for a simple question about "Is X Australian?" but the site also needs to be able to cope with questions like "Which Australian female won Best Actress in 2002?"

[Nicholas]

I assert that white people aren't australian.