Discussions on Influence
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I'm creating my own type for "Students." This is very useful, for example, with philosophers: Davidson and Dennett were students of Quine, Schopenhauer was a student of Fichte, etc.
However, I don't think that the teacher/student relationship deserves a separate type, since the relationship is just a specific type of influence.
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I agree that "students" and "student of" should by properties in an influence node. In the meantime, were is the "student" type that you've created? How do you create new types?
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There's an existing type, Academic, that has properties for advisor/advisee relationships. This help topic describes the process for creating types: Creating New Types with the Schema Editor.
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Amendment: On second though, it actually does make sense to have a separate Student/Teacher Type (aka. Lineage Node) within the Influence Commons base. That Type should have two properties "student of" and "students"
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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.
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This would be a denormalization, I think -- all Lineage Member data would have to be duplicated on the Influence Node type. Do you have a specific use case in mind for this?
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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. -
PS: For a tangible example, use an app like thinkbase to search for Marpa or Milarepa and look at the "student of" and "students" links vs. influence node connections. Follow the lineage down to Gampopa, who had a lot of important students (this is where many of the separate kagyu schools come from). Again, compare lineage member connections with the influence node connections.
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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/
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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
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Is there a topic or a blog for starting a relationship?
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Can you explain more?
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I was interested in finding women to become acquainted with, first with correspondence
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Freebase is not really a social networking nor dating site. Freebase does have Web sites in some categories, such as Dating system and Online dating service, but Freebase itself is not a good place for that. If you find more sites that should fit in those categories, please help us fill them out.
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A good way to get started adding influences is to spot missing connections from people already entered. Adding a connection will automatically type the added person as an 'influence node' if they are not typed already.
Martin Dudek's visualization is good for clicking around the graph quickly:
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There has been some discussion here...
http://freebase.com/discuss/threads/user/mikelove#/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008611163
...about how to filter only notable people for the applications running on Influence data. We want to allow people to add their influences, but at the same time keep the historical data clean. Wikipedia has it's set of policies around what qualifies as an article. Maybe influence should have an attribute that signals if the person is notable.
Generally, we want influence relationships implying a significant influence on a person's work - not just an interest or an inspiritational figure. -
Now that Influence Node is no longer limited to instances of Person, someone with access should update the type description accordingly. Thanks!
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