The Problem
You are in disagreement with Area 51-meta user Nij about the use of property in a proposed title for a
Q&A site for designers and users of property and technology for special needs.
Nij defends this usage with a personally formulated definition:
The word property has its normal meaning, and refers to tangible objects: furniture, vehicles, hardware, tools, devices, implements, signage, pathways, and so on.
Nij is arguing that property denotes a class whose common characteristic is tangibility and lists eight examples to convince you.
Of hypernyms and hyponyms
In essence, the argument is that property is a hypernym, or superordinate, of all the listed examples, which in turn are hyponyms of property. A hypernym is a word denoting a generic semantic field containing any number of hyponyms, specific examples of the hypernym:
x is a kind/type of y.
A finch, robin, sparrow, or vulture is a kind of bird.
As denoting kinds of birds, finch, robin, sparrow, vulture are hyponyms of the hypernym bird. Since there are also different kinds of vultures and finches, vulture and finch can be hypernyms for the names of individual species. Goldfinch and turkey vulture, however, still remain hyponyms of bird.
The essential property of property
For property to function as a hypernym as Nij maintains, all instances of property must be tangible. This, however, is not the case. Intellectual property is primarily intangible, and while it does not share certain characteristics with other kinds of property — it is indivisible, infinitely reproducible, inexhaustible, and difficult to protect — it does share the chief characteristic of property: it can be owned. Software, novel, film script, house, ranch, estate, sports car could thus be acceptable hyponyms of property, but could not be readily subsumed by Nij's “and so on.”
The website WordNet is an online dictionary organized on the basis of hypernyms and hyponyms. For property, there is an extensive list of hyponyms:
intellectual, community, personal, public, private, real (as in real estate) property; landholding, wealth, stockholding, belongings, things (as in "pack my things").
Whether it's all the things you're trying to stuff in a suitcase, a proprietary phone app, or a giant shopping mall, what connects them is they can be owned.
The Solution
It's highly unlikely that there is an acceptable hypernym for “things that can be improved for the use of those with special needs,” so unless one wants to chuck the whole title in favor of accessibility, then a short but comprehensive list of theoretical hyponyms, which in turn also serve as hypernyms, would have to suffice. A few choices come to mind:
services, products, private and public spaces
Then comes the fun part. Is transportation a hyponym of service? Is Nij's original technology also a product? You see, we play the hyper- hyponym game with language all the time, even if we don't use the vocabulary when we do.