Discussions on Domains and Types

Thanks jeff. I found the help docs.

 I've created a new Lineage Member type, which currently has "student of" and "students" properties.   May I suggest adding it to the Influence Commons schema?  Here are the sample topics that I've used the type with: http://www.freebase.com/view/user/flyingzumwalt/default_domain/lineage_member

Note: these links might break when I move the type out of my default domain. 

Pleased to oblige.

Example: The Mahamudra Lineage (Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism)

The Mahamudra Lineage is well defined.  Tilopa taught Naropa, who then taught Marpa.  Marpa returned to Tibet and taught Milarepa.  The lineage then continues and branches - Gampopa, Dusum Khyenpa, etc.  and can be traced all the way to living lineage holders today (over 1000 years of oral transmission).  The resulting branches of transmission formed the 4 major and 8 lesser lineages of the Kagyu school.

This stuff is important if you want to make sense of any oral tradition, especially when you look at events like the Rimey movement where a few very influential yogis spent their lives rescuing and consolidating dying lineages.  The resulting texts, which attempt to preserve the unique flavor of each lineage of instruction, have become some of the most important and most frequently referenced texts in modern Tibetan Buddhism.

In light of that, take a look at Milarepa's influence node.  He was influenced by both the Buddha and Marpa.  There's no way to distinguish that Marpa & Milarepa had a very significant personal relationship of instruction while the Buddha was simply an influence.

You might be tempted to say that it is sufficient to mark people as contemporaries (either explicitly or by means of birth/death dates).  This would fail though.  Proof: Anyone using freebase right now has been influenced by Tim Berners-Lee and we are all his contemporaries, but very few of us have actually been his students.  There is no way for me to find out who his actual students are.  The existing ontology is insufficient.

I think that highlights precisely the issue that Jeff was talking about.  Did Gampopa (Thinkbase link) really not "influence" some of his students or did someone just forget to do the redundant data entry (made necessary by the denormalization) in the "influence node" part of the graph?

Having said that, the Academic type that Jeff pointed to has precisely the same problem. Perhaps the Influencer/Influencer link needs to be qualified by type or strength or ...

One of the things of this type that I think it would be cool to be able to include is the Math Genealogy project http://www.genealogy.ams.org/

I have a use case, though not sure where or how to type it. Any who wants to handle it, go right ahead...

A Tutor (or the previously discussed Student/Teacher relationship) and how they influence (the influence node)...

Person: Darius Ford (Friend of Mark Twain - aka Samuel Clemens) Tutored: Olivia Langdon Clemens (wife of the famous author) While working at Elmira College as Professor of Physical Sciences.

Reference Citation : http://toolsofhistory.cdmhost.com/u?/p261501coll9,29

Seems like a good idea. Here are some comments:

1. Philip hasn't noticed this thread yet, so I'll save him the trouble of mentioning that it needs documentation. Particularly, Interests/Philosophical Subject and School of Thought need to be clearly disambiguated.

2. I'm not sure that delegating the influence node properties gets us anything -- there's no way to limit the influences to other Philosophers, for example.

documentation definitely required. (I'd suggest documentation should be a must-have requirement for any type considered for promotion)

Some useful tools for exploring the schema:

http://schemaviz.pak21.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/?domain=/user/alexander/philosophy

and

http://schemas.freebaseapps.com/domain?id=/user/alexander/philosophy

re #2. I'd agree with jeff - instead have /influence/influence_ node as an included type, and remove the /philosopher/influenced and /philosopher/influenced_by properties.

The philosophical era type I'd guess is a time period. I'd have a to and from date. Although I guess it may be hard to exactly define, so a preceded_by and succeeded_by properties, expecting philosophical era may be better.

The school of thought type might also benefit by linking to organizations which promote the school of thought. Perhaps a new philosophical organization type?

Bumping this up. I think we can promote these types pending two things:

1. Documenting the types
2. Identifying someone to be an admin in a new /philosophy commons (or a good suggestion for an existing commons to add this to.)

Any takers?

addition:

it seems like only one headquarter-address can be filled in?

f.

Thank you,

is there also the possibility to use an operator like "OR", e.g. Country name is "United Kingdom" or "Ireland"?

best regards,

Frank

Opened a bug, CLI-9193

It's because the client is not accepting edits to boolean properties that are not set to restricted to a single value.

A time-mediated CVT is an interesting idea, treating a medical condition as a sort of event, with start and end dates. Some medical conditions, however, don't have a clear start date, only a discovered or confirmed date. The cured part can be equally hard to measure, and the word "remission" is sometimes used because whether a recovery is temporary or permanent can only be determined with time. Nevertheless, for acute diseases or injuries, I suppose we can capture start/end dates.

What do others think?

Here's an example where I need to either insert the people being spoken to directly into the quotation, or semantically specify them using a property, a quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

Professor Minerva McGonagall: Why is it, that whenever anything happens, it's always you three? Ron Weasley: Believe me, Professor, I've been asking myself that same question for the past six years.

In the quote, "you three" refer to Harry, Ron, and Hermione. It wouldn't make sense without specifying that.

An addressee property (and expected type of Addressee) would be useful; as an example it would help anyone searching for anyone who has addressed Congress or the Senate.

Faye - wouldn't the Harry Potter quote actually be J.K. Rowling addressing her readers? (as well as in the fictional universe McGonagall addressing Ron Weasley et. al.)

To resolve this doubling with quotes in fiction, I'd suggest a new type - /fictional_universes/quotation (notice the move to the fictional universes commons). This would have the /quotation/spoken_by_character property moved to /fictional_universes/quotation/spoken_by. It would also have an /fictional_universes/quotation/addressed_to expecting a type of /fictional_universes/addressee. The /fictional_universes/quotation would include the /media_common/quotation type.

Iain: Yes, the author of this quote is indeed J. K. Rowling. The property "Spoken by character (if from fictional work)" is what inspired me. Seems that a quote spoken by a fictional character is often spoken to a fictional character, and it's rather asymmetric that one is captured and the other is not.

Your fictional quotation idea is interesting. Given the number of quotations from fictional works, though, wouldn't a large number of quotes end up cotyped with /media_common/quotation and /fictional_universes/quotation? It would seem a bit confusing for the casual user. All because I'm proposing to add a single property?

Spencer: Cool type! However, it doesn't address the use case where a quotation is not from a public speaking event, but from a private conversation.

I think a new property is preferable than a new fictional quotation type; in addition to the issue of addressing the audience directly, there's the issue of quotations from the narrator that are not, particularly, addressed to anyone (I mean, yes they're addressed to the reader, but not in the same way that a soliloquy is addressed to the audience). In these cases, we'd have fictional-universe quotations with no speaker and no audience, which would just seem weird.

So I think a new property (and quotation-addressee type), which is explicitly for the explicit addressee of a quotation (as opposed to the implied addressee, i.e. "the reader", "the audience", "the American people" [for those addresses to Congress]), would work.

@spencer: I don't see why a quotation source couldn't be an event. For speeches, the "Notable speech or presentation" type would be better than the speaking event, but it's entirely possible for quotations to come from other types of speaking events (panel discussions, Q&As, symposia, etc.).

Thanks Jeff, and a good description.

The person, character, or group that the quotation was addressed to. Many quotations do not have an explicit addressee, and this property should be left empty in those cases. Implicit addressees, such as "the audience" or "the reader" should not be entered.

I assume "the American people" would be an implicit group, and not to be entered?

Hi Frank,

Client logic displays only types in the Commons on the Consumer Page of a topic (i.e. url has /view/ before topic id). All types, including user types, are displayed on the topic's Edit Page (substitute /view/ with /edit/topic/). For the Einstein page you quoted, this is:

http://jewlib.www.jewlib.freebase.com/edit/topic/en/albert_einstein

I think the reasoning behind this is that it's best to show only the reviewed, high quality types to new visitors.

Unfortunately that also hides good quality user types which haven't yet made it to the commons.

However, you can get the base types to be shown by appending /-/base/jewlib to the end of the url as so:

http://www.freebase.com/view/en/albert_einstein/-/base/jewlib 

Masouras, good question...I just copied the address out of the browser window.

 I understand, but don't you think it might be helpful if there will be a clearer sign on additional content except the "Edit and show details"-button?

 f. 

Hi there,

 I wonder if there is a possibility to set a more prominent link to (non-commons)-user provided types in future. As I pointed out before, I am really not happy with the fact that user contributed data which is not contained in the common-types is hidden. In my opinion the "Edit and show details button" is irritating. Just to give one  example:

Freebase-standard-view:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000c38d9a9

Jewlib (with /-/base/jewlib extension):

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000c38d9a9/-/base/jewlib

cheers,

Frank 

If this is important to you, I would open a bug report/feature request at http://bugs.freebase.com  There was a bunch of negative feedback when the recent redesign was introduced, but I've never seen any indication that the designers think anything other than they got it exactly right.  Having a bug report will allow you to track progress and others to vote to support your request.

Personally, I think that "show details" is much, much too well hidden.  Not only is it way at the bottom of the screen so that you have to scroll down to even see it, but then it's in the 2nd half of the compound "edit and show details." 

If it were me, I'd have a separate button for "Show details" (even if it went to the same page) and I'd have it at the top of the screen.  This would allow me to instrument the UI to see what the users were actually selecting.  If I were optimizing for the user instead of programming effort or computational efficiency, I'd only have the "Show Details" button present and/or active if there were actually additional details to be shown which were not displayed on the main topic page.

It may be that Metaweb is trying to push people to design their own applications instead of depending on the Freebase.com web client, but that, in my opinion, would be a mistake. 

It would be great if you open a bug report/feature. Thank you!

 And: Yes, I am totally with you...

f.

>> I wonder if there is a possibility to set a more prominent link

>> to (non-commons)-user provided types in future. As I pointed out

>> before, I am really not happy with the fact that user contributed data

>> which is not contained in the common-types is hidden.

 Yes, it's a problem.  We've been trying to rethink how to surface good bases but it's been a slow process as there have been a bunch of other big projects going on.  It's next on the list, though.

> I've never seen any indication that the designers think anything other

> than they got it exactly right.

If that's just based on the fact that there hasn't been a design change yet, I think that's an unfair statement.

Jason - It's based on more than inaction.  There's an extensive discussion from a couple months ago where the only people who gave any indication that they thought there was a problem were the users.

http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/freebase-experts/2009-June/000699.html

Swapping two buttons between the top and the bottom of the page, relabelling a button with a label that makes sense to users, or even adding a new button with a separate label (but that is wired to go to the same place) are 5 minute tasks (perhaps the last is 10 minutes), so they certainly could get prioritized without having a significant impact on other tasks.

I've got a lot more to say about this, but perhaps it's more appropriate for email... 

Yes, that might be a interim solution. I personally think that it would be better to name all the types which are existent for a topic.  Maybe you can distinguish between common-types and user-created-types by using different visual designs or sth like that?

Especially in the case of topics which are not described by common type it seems to me complicated that you only get to the bases which contain the types. (and the have to search again for the topic)

f. 

Sorry for the delayed reply.  I've been moving house and haven't had any credits in my "spare time" account.

James is totally correct.  He did offer an encouraging reply to that thread.  Unfortunately, it came at the tail end after I'd already tuned the thread out as not going anywhere, so it failed to impress itself on my psyche.

I'm not sure how many iterations have been done in the last two months, but I just double checked the current display rendering and I think another iteration or two could improve things more.  Since the base-specific consumer page is much more nicely styled than the generic edit page, it sounds like that's an additional navigation destination that needs to be considered in the mix as well.

Frank - I think my wording may have mislead you.  I was suggesting that *you* file a bug report since you are the one who is directly affected and most interested in seeing this fixed.  I'm not planning on filing a bug report myself.

Good question Simon.

It seems like a sensible technical solution.  I'd guess as long as you attribute freebase in the external website, you're probably OK IMHO.  We've already got the likes of juggle, plopquiz and popstra which seem to be existing schemas orientated solely for use in external websites.

I don't think it would pollute freebase any more than the myriad of abandoned and underdeveloped schemas that lurk around - the freebase website is fairly adept at handling these.  Hence it has a clean 'view' page, and a second 'edit'/'add data' (aka 'geek') page for each and every topic on the freebase website.

Also do check the TOS, if you haven't already.

Iain 

The TSV data dumps don't currently include any keys. If you'd like to download keys in bulk, you can use the Link Export (1.6 GB, http://download.freebase.com/datadumps/). In that file, IMDB and Netflix keys will look like this:

/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000009e89 /type/object/key /authority/imdb/title tt0083658
/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000009e89 /type/object/key /authority/netflix/movie 70053131

Will that work for you? Let me know if there's anything else I can help with.

I think it should work, depending on the formatting within the dump files, and how long it takes me to successfully pull down a 1.6 gig file...

I'll post back when done. Thanks! 

OK. It took about an hour to download, which was faster than I expected. It also took about an hour to unzip, which was quite a bit more.

I am afraid that I now have a 25 gig file here that I am not sure how to approach. I think i still have much reading to do on your site (or somewhere) to figure out how I can start parsing some data out of that file.

Do I need to run a graph database over here locally for this? 

Or, let me back up. What I am really trying to get is something that would normally be returned by a SQL query that looks something like this:

SELECT imdb_id, netflix_id WHERE imdb_id IS NOT NULL and netflix_id IS NOT NULL; 

Is there a simpler way to get this subset of data easily? 

You don't need any kind of database to start using this data. If you're using a Unix-like environment, the simplest way to get at the keys you want is to directly filter it as a text-file for the key-namespaces you want using grep, like this:

grep "/authority/imdb/title" freebase-datadump-quadruples.tsv > imdb_keys.tsv

In this file, keys are represented as "id property key-namespace key-value". You could also filter by "/type/object/key" to get all the keys in Freebase.

That worked like a charm with the imdb data giving 19,558 records.

The netflix version returned 0 records, so I shortened the "search for" string down to "/netflix/" and got a lot of records with:

/user/hal/netflix/movie  (23,929 records)

 and   /user/hal/netflix/role  (8,397 records)

Are these the netflix records you referred to above as:

guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000009e89 /type/object/key /authority/netflix/movie 70053131

?

Correlating the /user/hal/netflix/movie records with the 

/authority/imdb/title records, i know have 11,189 matches -- that is 11,189 movies in the freebase dump file that have both an imdb id and a netflix id.

Does that sound about right? 

As I write this, there are 11,182 topics on the live graph which have both IMDB and Netflix title keys, so 11,189 from the slightly out of date data in the dumps is a perfectly reasonable number.

As an aside, 19 of those topics are not currently typed as a film. The first one of those that I looked at, The Human Factor, is a book and needs to be split into two topics; similar things may well apply for the other 18. Just a small health warning :-)

I've been thinking, and I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to simply have the type and property be for "peaks", which would make it easier to compare them or plot them on a map. E.g., if there were topics for all peaks of the North Palisades, you could easily order them by elevation; if the highest peak is considered to be the same as the Mountain topic, you have include both the mountain and its peaks in your query, which is harder.  In this model, mountains with no subsidiary peaks would presumably not have any values in this property.

What do you think?

I've created a new Energy unit, "Ton of TNT" that you can use. (I added kiloton and megaton of TNT for good measure.)

One other thing is that, in order to assign a unit, you'll have to change the expected type from floating point range to a plain old float, or create a new range CVT so that you can assign the units to the float properties. (Because the float range type is generic, units can't be assigned to properties it has.)

@spencermountain - you are correct, an explosive charge is measured in 'tonnes of TNT' or 'kilogram of TNT' with regards to blast effect on structures  - for example see Table 2.2 on Page 69 of http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g-L1O4YszQgC.

@jeff - could 'Kilogram of TNT' be added?

alright!

while we're at it, how bout a megawatt datatype for  powerplant?

hey, in one sentence or less, (joke) are freebases datatypes 'semantic? does killoton understand its 1000 times ton?or does each programmer do that stuff adhoc?

cheers guys. thanks.

Gotcher megawatt right here.

Now, whether Freebase's types understand anything or not is an open question. As far as we know, the graph hasn't achieved full sapience yet, but it could just be playing dumb.

If you look at the megawatt type, though, you can see that it has a property "Power in Watts" which can be used to do conversions between units that measure the same dimension (power, energy, length, etc.). There's nothing in Freebase to do this for you at the moment, but the structure is there if anyone wants to make use of it.

Jon, I agree and have removed the type and fixed the incoming topics.

However, I can see where it came from, the architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc was primarily only involved in restoration of old buildings, thus he has been noted, perhaps incorrectly, as the architect of the building - nothing distinguishing him from the original architect.

 For the Building Restoration topic, I've quickly crafted together a Project Phase type in the Engineering Base, and any comments would be helpful.

However, this sidesteps the re-occuring constraint with the structure type - the structure type does not take into account that a structure can have multiple architects and engineers, each involved at different times on different phases of the structure's lifetime (e.g. Initial design, compared to a later restoration).  Is there a quick fix to this, that doesn't add too much complexity to the structure type?

Just address a particular facet of this: When a building is first built, things are a more straight forward: there is an architect (multiple individual architects) and/or a firm(s).  The current "structure" schema supports this information.

 What to do about subsequent renovations,  I'm not sure, It's somewhat of an edge case, so some provisional schema seems prudent at this point. 

 In the case where an architect is essentially re-designing a building, there may be some things that can be done. There are numerous cases of old buildings where a key part was kept while a completely new building, by a new architect, in a different style was built up around it.   Is that a new building?  A simple way of approaching this case is: for the original structure topic. fill in the "Destroyed By" -> "Renovation" and the "Destruction Date".  Then create a new topic representing the "new" building.

In some cases, an old building is mostly preserved while a new addition or "wing" is added.  Having a "Building Complex" with a topic for each individual "Structure" can be workable in this case. e.g. Mission SF

Just to add: the two cases I've given are ones where I am asserting, is this "entity" really the same entity, now that a renovation has occured?

 Here's another example: The Contemporary Jewish Museum

 (without addressing the conflation of the museum and it's main building!)

It seem confusing to list Willis Polk as the architect of this building (he designed the original building that this new design was grafted on to).   I'd prefer to have another topic with it's own picture and details of it's design (and the assertions that this building, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists)

Does that make sense?

@brendan - perfect sense.  Where buildings have been demolished, or majorly regutted and rebuilt it would be better to have two different topics.   The Tay Bridge which was destroyed in an infamous disasterand completely rebuilt is another example where two distinct structures share one topic as they have a common location and name.

@skud - I really like your project schema, I think it solves all my issues here.  With regards to structures I would assume that the project topic would be named, for example, "Design and Construction of the Empire State Building" and would link to the "Empire State Building" topic through the Project focus property?

I had wrestled with doing this with my 'Engineering Project' type, but I didn't want to start atomising topics (i.e. splitting a topic into a 'Construction of x', 'Design of x' and so on) - and instead settled on a CVT called 'Engineers Role'.

If there is a consensus amongst the Architecture domain that the project schema is the way forward, I am happy to move my Engineering Project data to it and delete the superseded types in the Engineering domain.

@sprocket: You are absolutely right about the Empire State Building example.

I showed Brendan the Project schema yesterday f2f at the office, and he liked it.  We talked about promoting it and making types like /architecture/structure and /computer/software include the Project Focus type.  Brendan seemed fairly positive about the idea of deprecating and hiding the project-related fields on /architecture/structure and gardening the contents of them out to the project types.  The problem with that would be that we'd break some saved views and apps, but then, that's always the problem with schema changes.  However, the number of people using stuff from /architecture is fairly contained and we can probably manage it.

 If you wanted to make use of the Projects schema for your Engineering stuff, that would be a great test run of it.  I have to admit I was thinking fairly abstractly and didn't really have any good examples to enter data for (though I did try out the Manhattan Project, as a potential edge-case, and it seemed to work OK).  So it would be great to have some real data using it so we can kick the tyres a bit before promoting.

I've added some structures data to the project type.  I chose a particularly complex example, the temporary skylon structure and its associated projects for the 1951 Festival of Britain, as a starting point.

 The type seems to work very well (except that the project focus doesn't return link to project) , and I was particularly pleased at being able to note the dignitary who laid the foundation stone of the Royal Festival Hall!

jeff - good point.  I don't think there is enough data on this particular topic to warrant seperating the design from the construction.  So I've renamed it 'Initial design and construction of the Royal Festival Hall' which describes my intent slightly better.  

skud - I've also filled out the recent Renovation of the Royal Festival Hall, so now we have a project focus with two projects.

Thank you Faye.  I appreciate your tip!  I welcome any info that will better ensure correct entries.

 Have a great day!  Thanks again!

I see that there is actually a rail line type in jonathanwlowe's transporatationbase, but it seems rather sparse and underdeveloped schema wise.

I notice that notable long distance railways, such as trans-siberian railway and the channel tunnel rail link are untyped, as well as notable rail networks, such as Trans-European High-speed rail network. and the former trans-europ Express.

With regards to railway disaster, this has the added complexity that ver specific details on individual trains (e.g. the 8:39am from Drayton Park on the Highbury Branch, terminating at platform nine of Moorgate station driven by 56 year old Leslie Newson) can be noted.

I think we should definitely model long-distance rail, or else broaden the scope of transit line to allow for it.

Looking at the schema on transit line, I see that it's more to do with the *service* than the physical line.  That is, the things typed there include stuff like bus services, and it says that if you have an express and a local then that should be two different entities.  So it doesn't seem that that type is appropriate for the examples you give.  I almost feel like transit line should be renamed "transit route".

 I also think we should have types for "Rail network" and "Railway line".  Railway lines have things like gauge, etc, which other transit lines don't.  And we should almost certainly be modeling types of trains, since I'll bet there's a metric buttload of it on Wikipedia. At least, if I know anything about railfans there will be.

Oh yeah.  Take a look at the Wikipedia article for Narrow gauge rail transport.

I might take a stab at modeling railways in a nerdy trainspotter way.  Not that I am one, but I'll wear the anorak for the cause ;)

I agree. I have created a ticket for the data team to adress this:

https://bugs.metaweb.com/browse/DA-521

Updated link (the previously mentioned no longer works):

https://bugs.freebase.com/browse/DA-521

(guys, breaking internet links is bad practice mmkay, a 301 redirect would’ve been nice :)).

I agree.

This could be modelled by having the Transit Lines property have a Data Type of 'Transit Line Stops', a new type which would be a CVT.  Properties for 'Transit Line Stops' would be 'Transit Line', 'Transit Stop', 'Date Stop Added To Line' and 'Date Stop Removed From Line'.

Hi Brian,

I can't find the broken link, can you be more specific about which one didn't work?

Under "Develop Apps In Javascript", the bulletpoint:

• Hello World. This List of Countries is generated with only a few lines of Javascript. You might want to read about mqlread in the API docs.

Hi thequux,

Welcome to Freebase! I think these are all really good suggestions and I've implemented the changes that you suggested in the sandbox. Please feel free to play around with the data in the sandbox and let me know if I missed anything. If no one objects to these changes I can add them to the main CS base sometime next week.

Here is the STL documentation for anyone interested in seeing the complete hierarchy that's being proposed.

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.