Discussions on Business
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FYI, I just created a new Trade Union type in this domain. It's quite simple, and just links to industries and professions which the union represents. There are reciprocal links from each of those types back to the union. Trade union also includes organization and employer.
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It would be good to capture local or alternative currencies. Should the currency type be applied to those? Should a new type be created as well, or alternatively? If yes, would it belong in Business commons or somewhere else?
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I like the idea, but it might be complex. I know a lot of currencies are fixed at a consistent exchange rate to the US dollar, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the dollar is accepted currency in anyway. Also the black market requirement for the Euro or US$ doesn't necessarily mean it is an alternative currency in any official business. Do you know of any examples of countries with officially recognised multiple currencies?
Where I am the fuel stations will accept payment in most currencies of neighbouring countries, but most shops will only accept the local currency. Hotels sometimes accept US dollars, but most payments are local currency. It varies depending on the business and the demographics of their customers, so no hard or fast rule or official support.
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OK, just seen the discussion on the mailling list - and that you were referring to community currencies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Community_currencies
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How do we want to do JVs? Technically the companies that "own" the JV would go under Major Shareholders, however there's no way to actually designate the JV as a JV (as opposed to a "regular" company that is public and has shareholders).
Perhaps it could be a Company Type?
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One year later...
Any updates on recommended practices here? I just detyped a bunch of telecom companies as People because they had been designated "founders" of a joint venture (which is arguably semantically correct).
One problem with using Major Shareholders is that it doesn't appear to be date mediated, so once they sell their share the information is lost (as happened in this case when the entire JV got sold to another company)
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There is a *lot* of data out there regarding shares and securities which we just aren't modelling yet.
Some food for thought:
- Stock markets
- Market indices
- Bonds, Stocks, Futures, Structured Finance, Commodities etc..
- Derivatives
- IPOs and share issues
- Investment funds
- Banks & Traders
- Structured Finance - particularly Mortgages
- Bankruptcy and Bail outs!
Needless to say, the entire financial area needs a *huge* amount of work. :(
But for starters I'd rename the "major shareholders" to "shareholders" and also mediate by the amount of shares held, as well as date.
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The two types, 'Industry' and 'Industrial Classification' each have (distinct) parent/child properties. Should they be merged?
I'm asking because I want to be able to query retail locations filtered by their geolocation (for instance a bounding box in South London defined by latitude and longitude values) and then tally the results by industrial classifications -- for instance, reporting on the total 'Taxi and Limousine Service' instances regardless of whether their finest grain of industrial classification is 'Taxi Service' or 'Limousine Service'. The 'Industrial Classification' type already has parent/child industries populated, but the 'Industry' type parent/child properties are less reliably populated. If they're the same, should they be merged? If not, how are they different?-
I agree that the Industry type should be merged with the Industrial Classification type. I believe that Industry was derived from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Industries but Ill check on that....
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Glad you agree, jg -- do you think that a merge of Industry and Industrial Classification types might happen in the short- or longer-term?
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This issue struck me as strange as well. I think a merge would contribute to both types, since right now both of them are pretty sparse, whereas combining them might reach a critical mass of data.
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-- sorry for the double post - but I also realized how odd it is to have all the NACE, ISIC, etc. properties when the only one truly in use (i.e. has at least one object that uses it) is NAICS. Why are they there? Are there plans to add this data sometime?
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agree above guys
from http://english.51766.com by lisa
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I'm not sure where to begin on this one.
It is not odd to have more than just NAICS, which is North America specific. NACE is used in the EU, and some countries even have their own classification (like France, the NAF).
And I know D&B still widely uses SIC Code, even though it has been replaced.
I am not familiar with all the codes in the type, but we should research first before removing any, to make sure we're not making the fields North America specific, or if the codes are standard for some reason that is not readily obvious.
As for Industry vs Industrial Classification, I know when I was filling in the Export/Import information in countries, using the CIA World Factbook as a guide, it was difficult or impossible to fill certain values in. You can't export "Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing", instead you export the actual product. So not sure if that means the export/import fields need to be changed or we need another field/category for the industrial classification (less doable)? Or we just live with non-intuitive values in the import/export fields??
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Import/export actually expects "industry", which is more general than "industrial classification". Instances of the industry include things like Computers, Consumer electronics, and Petroleum, which are values I would expect to see as imports and exports. I think this is the advantage of keeping the two types separate -- they have slightly different semantics which are useful in different contexts.
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I think this is correct, that the generic product is not represented well by the NAICS codes. For example the closest you get to 'Petroleum' in the NAICS tree is:
Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing 324
Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing 3241
Petroleum Refineries
Asphalt Paving, Roofing, and Saturated Materials Manufacturing
Other Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing
... all the way down to
Petroleum Refineries 324110Which is clearly not what you want. I do think though that the classification of companies is going to have to come in two flavours, the topic based /business/company/industry and a different property linking to the NAICS (and hence SIC and other codes that map to that same classification).
It would be very hard to merge the industry tree with the NAICS tree without creating new things that had no NAICS codes.
On the topic of NACE, SIC equivalences etc, the plan would be to load them all.
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After further investigation, it transpires that the NAICS and SIC classifications were added to /business/industry some time ago. So we plan to deprecate industry_classification. All the same info is available in the other type. I have moved the few current uses of specific industry classifications over to their corresponding industry and plan to retire the type altogether since its no longer in use.
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I just mistakenly added all the other classification systems I could find to this type, following the example of its lone member ANZSIC. If I delete them all again, can someone get the type deleted?
I started off looking for a type for taxonomies/classification systems (for the West American Digest System). Do we have a good type for these?
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I have removed the type. Sorry for the confusion.
As for taxonomies, the closest I can see is /base/ontologies/ontology
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The type venture investment, which is a CVT, has a property that expects a CVT (namely monetary value). This sort of model doesn't really work in the client. I'd like to refactor this to put "currency" and "value" properties directly on the Venture Investment CVT type. Any objections?
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Sounds OK to me, but could you post it on the dev list as there may be apps working with this? (unlikely, as there is only one topic with the data filled in, but just incase)
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Yes, of course.
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Wellpoint NextRx is a division, not a subsidiary, and is now being bought by Express Scripts. Currently there's no way to show this type of M&A activity at the company division level (which is not uncommon).
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Businesses have competitors, it’d be nice to map these. Most likely useful when sliced by market segment (e.g. MP3 players, computers, etc.)
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Ben, the definition of competitor is very broad. It means that anyone offering a similar product or operating in the same market is a direct competitor. And any company in a competing market segment (say TV industry causing the demise of the Cinema industry) is an indirect competitor.
For direct competitors, I don't think a new type or relationship is required, just a view - e.g. a view of all companies who have products which are also typed as computers, would get all the competitors of a computer producer. (or it would if there was more data! - see example: http://www.freebase.com/view/user/sprocketonline/default_domain/views/competing_computer_producers
Indirect competitors are a bit harder, I would think you would need to do this via a companies industry property, somehow....
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hi, id like to model job terminations, 'reasons for job termination' and 'job termination event'
say for example i would this model the Enron scandal- and Jeffrey Skilling's role
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BCBS Illinois is a division of Health Care Services Corp, and not an actual legal company. However, according to news reports, Desiree Rogers was a board member of BCBS Illinois. Can we add board member to Company Division so we can show this type of relationship? Not sure how else to do this.
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The mini-map should map the HQ location, not the place founded. Presumably "place founded" doesn't move with the company, but HQ does. My company, Vidoop, is a good example of this.
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Once geobot comes through and geocodes your address, I think it will show both.
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Looks like geo_bot marked up the address on Jan 2, but the map for sure only shows Tulsa.
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Why doesn't the Business location type include the Location type?
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The Business Location has a mailing address... unfortunately the client doesn't let you click through and view the mailing address as a separate object, but the "Mailing Address" type actually includes "Location".
All Mailing addresses are automatically geocoded by a bot... this means that if you add a new business location and give it an address, that address will (eventually) have longitude and latitude added automatically.
I have an example of my blog of using the geocoded addresses to build a map visualization:
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So, to clarify, you are saying that a bot will automatically add a 'Location' type, with the geolocation automatically filled in to the 'Business Location' type? (assuming the address property of 'shopping centre' is filled in correctly)
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Currently we have no link between "iPhone" and "Apple" in our schema. That is, the consumer product type has no property for the company that makes that product. The problem is that if you talk about "Product manufacturer" you get all caught up in the fact that actually, some factory in China manufactures/assembles the iPhone. But I talked to some of our business guys and asked them, and they said that the term manufacturer, though imprecise, is the right term to use. And we couldn't come up with anythign better.
So here's what I propose:
1) A type, "Product manufacturer". The description for that type should explain that it applies to the company ultimately responsible for producing the product, and isn't intended to capture the actual physical manufacturing of the product eg. by subcontracted factories.
2) On the type "Consumer product", a property called "Produced by" which expects "Product manufacturer". Calling it "produced by" will discourage people who are looking at the iPhone page from putting in the name of the Chinese factory.
3) Additionally, a type called "Product line" which has the properties "Parent product line" and "Includes sub-lines" (i.e. a phylogeny pattern) as well as "Products in this line" which expects "Consumer product".
4) On "Consumer product", a reverse property called "Part of product line"
It's not perfect but it seems good enough for now, and better than nothing. Thoughts?
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How do we create a subtype of Job Title to handle Named Job Titles?
like the "Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, at Harvard Business School" ?
Ie: these should be titles, but subtypes, so if you say someone is the "Fooperson Chair of Some Such" it would also be the case that they are a "Chair of Some Such" as well.
Named titles are named in honor of someone else, and are typically associated with tenure, or a stipend/salary. They almost always are associated with an Educational Institution, as long as that type includes think-tanks, and other pseudo educational organizations.
Thanks,
Dave
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I'd just put them in as ordinary job titles, and leave it at that, since there is no structure to job titles, and I think it a diverse enough field that it would be practically impossible to impose one. If you wanted to show who it was named after, you could add the Namesake type to the job title, which would allow you to link it to the person for whom it was named.
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and while you're add it - set it as the reason for ceasing operations for Northern Rock
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I agree Nationalization should be a company termination type.
I would also like to see Disbandment, as an example the Tecton group disbanded in 1948. And also a number of companies are disbanded due to the retiral of their founder and/or CEO.
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I think Found Guilty of Criminal Activities is also required, I tried to model Charle's Ponzi's company, Securities Exchange Company, which was closed when Ponzi was convicted of mail fraud.
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perhaps the 'reason for ceasing operations' should not be an enumeration. I agree with 'nationalization' but not 'mail fraud' (ponzi's company was insolvent). but reasonable people should be able to debate such things...
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I've changed the type from an enumerated list to a standard topic.
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Could a property noting the year a company division was terminated (became defunct) be added? Of type Date/Time.
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There is a "To" property on the "Company/Division Relationship" CVT, which was intended for this purpose.
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My bad - missed that!
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Would it be possible to add a field for company registration number? Unlike a DUNS which is proprietary, in many countries (e.g. in the UK all private and public companies have a unique registration number from Companies House) a registration number will allow public information about the entity to be tracked down.
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Why is Company Type locked? There are many legal structures of companies, and even state-owned enterprises. But very few are listed here. Is there a particular reason for this? If so, it would be good to have that documented so those of us filling in company information know how ot complete this field. Thanks
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Enumerated types like Company Type aren’t locked, they’re just a little harder to add to, in order to discourage accidental proliferation. Additions must be made through the query editor or some other way that isn’t the client. We do encourage you to discuss the proposed additions with the community first, though, to avoid edit wars on high-profile types. What specific instances do you think are conspicuously missing?
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Well, I guess it depends on what we want to use it for. Do we want to use generic terms for multiple legal types, or do we want to be more specific.
For example, PLC is Public Limited Company. "Public limited company" could be used to cover all those types in various countries, or it could be for the specific Plc used in UK.
But unless you are intimately aware of what SA (Societe Anonyme) is, or use the Wiki page to see what approximate equiv is, then chances are no one is going to use this field (at least for "harder" ones). I deal with company names all the time, so I'm familiar with Oyj, AG, KgaA, etc, but I don't know what they translate to.
Either way we're missing values. If we keep the "generic" route, then we (I) should comb through the wiki page and identify the big ones we're missing, like "Limited Partnership with Shares" (for SCA & KgaA, for example). Though I'm not sure if all can be mapped (like KK, which is common in Japan, though I think it is usually seen as Co Ltd).
So I think we need to figure out what direction we want to take, generic or country specific, and I don't think either is an easy answer (either you have a long list of specifics or a hard to determine list of generics).
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Seeing the Calvin Klein Underwear topic with the type of Company attached to it, made me wonder how we want to handle divisions and brands.
I believe the intent for the Company schema is to flag legal companies, like Calvin Klein Inc or General Dynamics Corp. So parent companies and their subsidiaries. If correct, then divisions and brands would not be assigned to the Company type.
If so, then we may need a way to flag topics as a division (or perhaps we do this somehow in the Company schema). Same with brands, which are not always separated from the parent company.
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Take a peek over on sandbox: I just posted a proposed modification to the company schema to handle divisions on sandbox. See https://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/remington_rand for an example (example expires Monday!).
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ooh, I think that works! I like how you have the options of indicating whether or not it was acquired, etc (which happens a lot). Thanks, Jeff
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I just added several new properties and helper types for Company:
Previous names -- holds previous names for companies with the dates they changed
Spin offs (Spun off from) --
Companies acquired (Acquired by)
Created from merger (Merged into) -- This one is a bit more complicated. Two or more companies merge on a particular date and can (but not always) create a new company
Assets sold (Assets acquired) -- A new type "Company asset" can be transferred between companies.-
I think the property "new name" on the "company name change" type should just be "name". If you're entering previous names, the idea of entering a "new name" is somewhat confusing.
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I can't use the descriptor "name" as it is reserved. What should I use instead?
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"Previous name" might do.
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I would rather that each different company name be a different topic.
The company type would have 'name changed from' and 'name changed to' properties. -
Part of the idea behind topics in Freebase is that there should be only one topic for any given "thing". If a company just changes its name, it doesn't necessarily become a different entity, any more than when a person changes their name.
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A suggestion is to add an "End date" property to the Company_name_change type.
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I think it'll be a good idea if these two fields are included for the company type to identify companies...
The DUNS number is widely used and is required by the US government for grants and contracts.
www.dnb.com/US/duns_update
The ISIN seems to be gaining traction in europe and its a ISO standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Securities_Identifying_Number
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