Discussions on Government

Hi Dublinstreams,

To add politicians to Freebase, go to Politician and click on the "Add More Topics" button (upper right). Enter each name, or else click on "Go to the import tool" to paste in a list. Once you've added them, you can edit each one to specify which governmental body they're part of. You should do this using the "Government positions held" property; the 30th Dail would be under "Legislative Sessions".

You could also start from 30th Dail and edit "Members" there. If you wanted to import a list, you could click on the little arrow next to the "Edit" button and choose "Import list".

okay, might do a bit more fiddling in sandbox to learn instead of here, now that i found it, you don't make it easy to find your help content... or basic start advice.

so will you pull in their constituency and positions and date of assumed office too? dob etc etc

I was wonder having connected to the wiki, why you didn't pull in the other info too...

the problem is that the infoboxes on wikipedia most poltician pages, they have "assumed office" for both the date they win an election and they date they are appointed to particular position in government or party, which is quite unclear... i was hoping to scrap the info for timeline, but even dbpedia uses termstart for both coming from wikipedia... as will you's i suspect...

have to say how long should i wait, often website promise something soon as years pass by

You're preaching to the choir as far as the "Getting started" docs go. Another good source of information which you may not be aware of is the archives for the 'developers' and 'data-modeling' lists. The wiki is new, so it's not well populated yet. The good news is - it's a wiki, so as you find stuff that you think should have been there, go ahead and add it. It's hard to replicate the viewpoint of a fresh set of eyes.

As far as timing goes, the developer who's working on the politicians already did a trial load on the sandbox (although it didn't include the TDs because the topic wasn't typed correctly yet), which usually means things are pretty close. I'd guess closer to days than months, but I'm not speaking for him.

Great, thanks.

What does that mean? Will a bot classify such topics and/or edit them? Should we edit them manually (e.g. make sure information is captured before the wrong type is removed)?

There's already a task in place to migrate the political appointment data to the Appointment schema: DA-797.

In terms of modifiying the appointment schema, I can think of two approaches: 1. Add a property to the CVT for role of the appointer 2. Add a property to Appointed Role for the role(s) which can appoint to that role. The disadvantage to two is that it might get confusing -- a lot of positions are normally elected, but can be filled by appointment if they are vacated mid-term.

And the disadvantage to approach #1 is repetition, since all the appointed will likely share the same appointer office/role/title.

Hmm, DA-797 is actually migration in the opposite direction to what I had in mind from the perspective of notable types.

So I assume the reason there are appointer/appointee/appointment types in the People domain instead of folding them into the Government domain is that there are non-government positions that are appointed that we want to capture? I'm having trouble coming up with examples outside of governments, where there are positions of power that grant authority to appointers and needs for hierarchies and clear lines of responsibility and blame that necessitate appointees. I suppose businesses can appoint leadership positions, but those are not what one typically thinks of when one thinks of appointees.

The original discussion on appointments is here: Employer?

Even if we wanted to keep governmental appointees distinct from other appointees, we'd still have to refactor to a general "Political Appointment" model, since lots of governmental positions are appointed without fitting into the Politician schema. Even omitting corporate appointments, judicial and ecclesiastical roles are often filled by appointment, so I think one general schema is much preferable to _n_ appointment schemas, every time someone finds another niche of appointments that they want to enter.

Ah, OK. I was counting judicial positions within my overreaching definition of "big government". Fair enough.

My concern lies with the weakening of the type Politician by removing properties for political appointments, thus making instances less notable as politicians through the Notable Types algorithm. So much of a politician's career is already modeled on other, more generic, types: employment history on Person, activism via Activist, organization participation via Organization Member. To say someone is an "appointer" or "appointee" would make no sense outside of Freebase.

Nevertheless, I have to admit the schema merge makes sense from a data modeling perspective; we just have to figure out a way to deal with it for Notable Types, somehow. Alas, the problem is mine, not yours.

Is there any reason not to follow the procedures and terms as defined and used by the House and the Senate?

I there any reason not to conform to the methodology of the House and the Senate?

http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/Session_Dates/sessionsAll.html

http://senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/one_item_and_teasers/Years_to_Congress.ht 

Here's the Senate's definition of session:

session - The period during which Congress assembles and carries on its regular business. Each Congress generally has two regular sessions (a first session and a second session), based on the constitutional mandate that Congress assemble at least once each year. 

It seems this schema has been improperly designed, but my knowledge of schemas is not sufficient for me to state this with any degree of certainty.

The House and Senate doc's, however, are clear, and, furthermore, are clearly different from Freebase.

What is the next step here?

Actually, in looking at this more closely, the issue is that the property "sessions" is associated with the type Governmental Body which is generic to all types of governments, not something specific to the United States. I'm not familiar enough with the world's governments to know if there's a good word which would be more appropriate than "sessions" for which is encoded here.

The next step is to get more informed opinions from someone that knows more about this than me, specifically the domain administrators http://www.freebase.com/view/government#domain-members.  They're the only ones that can change things anyway, assuming that a change is needed.

Thanks for catching the ambiguity in the terminology.  The schema is intended to capture Congresses (Knessets, Dumas, Parliaments, etc.), rather than what are typically called sessions, so name "session" was probably the wrong choice. The use seems to be that the period between elections is called by the name of the legislative body, but we can't call the type and properties "Legislative Body", since that would be too easily confused with the "Governmental Body" type.

Maybe "Instance of Governmental Body" (since executive bodies like the Swiss Federal Council also use this type), or something similar?

Please let me know what you think.

W/r/t political parties, looks like there are currently only 3:

• Unity Party
• New Democracy
• People's National Party

Re Political parties:  I see the issue now. These are absolutely not governmental bodies (well, the Central Committee, maybe, but whatever it is, it isn't also a political party).

To the broader question, I'm going to try to sum it up, and see if you agree (or anyone else out there in discussion-land!):

The only type that allows for appointments is the Government Office Held CVT, accessible only if the appointee is a Politician.  However, lots of positions people are appointed to in government are not related to Governmental Bodies. There is the additional issue of being an employee, irrespective of how you got the job. The White House Chief of Staff is surely employed by the Office of the President of the United States, although he is appointed by the POTUS.

Here's my off-the-top-of-my-head proposal:

1. Remove the "appointed by" part of the schema from Government Office Held.

2. Create a new schema for political appointees that would record Appointer, Appointee, Date, and Position.

3. Appointees in the new schema can then additionally be typed as politicians (a la Roland Burris), ambassadors (there's a schema kicking around for that somewhere), employees, judges, etc.

This would result in a minor denormalization (all appointees would probably have their position/title and start date entered in two locations), but would save us from trying to do some insane, octopus-like model for all possible government people.

+1 for a separation of Civil servants from Politicians in the schema. 

#2. Does it have to be specific to political appointments?  It would be great to use the appointee/appointer relationship in other domains. (e.g. boards of companies etc..)

#3. skud's ambassador type is here.

Also, there is a mess between specific and general titles e.g. 'Mayor of San Francisco' and 'Mayor' which both exist in Government office and titles.  I think the title should be specific.  But I'd like to also somehow note that the title 'Mayor of SF' is a 'Mayor'.  (similar to Prince of Wales is a Prince in the Royalty & Nobilityschema)

Sprocket: I like the appointment schema; it's simple and clean.  Should appointments have a "to" value?  Or should that be left solely as part of the tenure of the appropriate cotypes (board membership, gov't position held, etc.)?  I'm asking because the act of appointing necessarily has a date of appointment, but doesn't itself have an end date.

I agree that the title should be specific. Linking the title to the role is a good idea.

@jeff.  thanks for the feedback.  I took a look at it and didn't like the overlap with the dates - I hate filling in the same info twice.  I've removed the 'to' date and also changed the 'from' date to 'declared on'.

'declared on'  will be the date the appointment was announced, even though the appointee might not take up the post until a later date.  It captures some extra data, rather than duplicating data.

Having done a bit of googling, it does seem 'appointment' in relation to a company might just be an industry term related primarily to construction.

In the construction industry 'appointment' is used when referring to the award of a contract to a firm - see this pdf for example.

The dictionary definition for appointment explicitly states person, and I'm thinking that using the schema for contracts might get messy.

I think business contracts are better in a seperate business orientated scheme, if required, so I'll change the documentation for appointment and include person as a type for appointee.

The construction "appointment" usage is also culture specific (ie Brit-speak).  In the U.S. contracts are put out to/for bid and then the contract is awarded to the bidder with the best political connections.  :-) No appointments involved.

All the U.S. instances in Iain's Google search use "tender" as a verb, not a noun (ie "tender appointment" as the opposite of "tender resignation" where the word means "offer").

I've loaded 11,623 IDs in the production database.  They can be seen in the U.S. Politician base and they can be accessed directly by ID by using URLs of the form http://uspolitician.freebase.com/view/base/uspolitician/thomas_id/K000105

I'm testing another file on the sandbox which will hopefully up the count by another 100-200, but after that the last couple hundred entries will probably require hand resolution.  The ones I've looked at so far have been things like typos in birthdates on data entry, duplicate topics, topics with no types or structured data, etc.

The notification about this reply apparently scrolled off my home page before I saw it, so I just noticed it now when I was looking at the sandbox to see if it had been refreshed yet.

I get an error when I try to look at DA-653, but since I hadn't seen any action, I created 

http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/base/uspolitician/u_s_congressperson    which has an enumeration in a namespace that I created as well as a URL template that links back to the Congressional Bioguide.

I've loaded the first 200 or so (all the As) which I had hand verified on the production database and will populate the entire list (at least the 95% or so that I can resolve) on the sandbox after it refreshes tonight so that folks can check out the rest of them.

Perhaps Metaweb can get their offshore data entry folks to clean up the remaining 5% which require hand resolution. 

This is a good point. Note that the United States topic itself, under the Country type, has a Form of government property. (Hmm… incorrectly given right now as Democracy and as Constitution.) I see you added Constitutional republic to that list.

There is an interesting dichotomy between a nation and the government thereof; it is hard to say which should really have information about the type of the government.

It applies not only to countries but to smaller jurisdictions as well… hm. Worth thinking about.

Political parties may operate across multiple jurisdictions within a country, but do not operate between countries, so I think the country is still the right level of distinction. (Movements may have parties in multiple countries, and parties may coöperate, as the Green and Communist parties, for example, but that is not the same as having one party in multiple countries.)

The cases where local affiliates of national parties have differing names, such as DFL in Minnesota or the Constitution Party in California, are the exception rather than the rule, and I am not convinced that the few cases warrant changing the model. These local groups can and should be typed as Organizations to model their affiliations and geographical scope, but the national parties should be the primary topics of interest.

Making organization an included type of political parties would solve most of these issues. State political parties would be typed as organizations that would have a suborganization link to the national party and county parties would be suborganizations of state parties. I can't think of anycases where a political party would not also be considered an organization. From a quick glance, it seems to me that all of the organization properties are applicable to political parties.

I've changed my mind on changing the country link, based on Chris' arguments, and because it would make queries on politicians much harder. If we wanted all Democratic mayors of U.S. cities, we would have to construct a two step query instead of just querying against membership in a single political party.

Close, but not quite. Freebase is internationalized: that means that every string is labeled as being in a particular language. The strings seen in the Web client view—both the names and the aliases—are explicitly labeled as English. So to say that the English name of the Russian Ministry of Defense is Министерство обороны Российской Федерации would be wrong. The Russian name of the Russian Ministry of Defense is Министерство обороны Российской Федерации, and there is a way to say that in MQL, it just can’t be accessed in the Web client right now.

Short version: for now, any words you see or enter in the Web client should be English. 

OK, I think I follow that.  Thanks for the explanation!

Unfortunately, I'm finding that not everything has an official English name, and the translation is iffy on many of those.  In those cases I am leaving it in the local language; maybe someday we'll find a good English name and we can correct.

Yeah, that's a tricky one.  Agency and ministry heads are frequently appointed positions, which could be an argument for their being typed as politicians, but pretty much everybody working under them would pretty clearly be an employee.  Maybe having the appointment information on the Government Position Held CVT is a mistake, and there should be a separate type for Appointed Official (or something).

Agency vs. Body is clearer, although maybe the documentation isn't -- a body should be reserved for legislatures, oligarchic coucils (like Switzerland's executive), and the like. Agencies are, well, agencies. (I confess that I'm not sure where departments and ministries fit in this schema, however.)

You mean you don't have a clear answer? [checks sky to see if it is falling]

In all seriousness, I forget about the appointed aspect of the Ministers/Dept heads.  It just seems strange to have a person's career not have everything in the employment history area (at least for full time positions).  Ugh, I have no idea what the right thing to do is. 

And I think Ministries are more Agencies than Bodies.   That's where I've been sticking them, so if I'm wrong, you may hear some cursing :)

As a good starting place to explore this information, you should take a look at the Filter Table View. Here's a view that shows all U.S. Presidents who served in the Army as Brigadiers General

To do more detailed searches to do things like aggregate the number of presidents who have served in each branch of the armed services you may want to look into MQL, the Metaweb Query Language.

Hope this gives you a good start.

Sorry, that link got screwed up. Hopefully this one works:

Filter Table View

Finally, this should work:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008ffcc10

Thanks Jeff. I understand that joguinn was asking for something slightly different but I think that this might still reduce some of the manual labour associated with linking politicians to parties.

Right now, it looks like he's typing Republican Party as an Organization and adding Bob Barr to its members and then on Barr's page it shows that he's a member of an organization called the Republican Party but he also has to add the Republican Party to Bob Barr's party property as part of the Politician type.

Now that Political Party has a reverse link, all he needs to do is set Republican Party as Bob Barr's party and Barr will automatically appear on the Republican Party page as a Politician in this Party.