Discussions on Media Common
Start a New Discussion
-
-
I was adding to Human Extinction as subject for films and some literature/poems
I would like to add the few tv programs that deal with such a cheerful subject matter like Life After People.
(Or maybe we should just have a media commons type for subject matter of a show or series in TV as well as for songs/compositions. Or just add subject to all the arts that are missing subjects)
-
Oh, yes, this should be posted as a suggestion in Media Commons as well.
-
Yeah, Jeff and I were talking about this just the other day. There is a proliferation of "X subject" types out there: book subject, film subject, video game subject, visual art subject, etc. I don't know whether we can combine them all or whether we want to or what, but it seems worth thinking about.
-
I definitly vote for merging all media into a generic media commons property, or at least merge the types for Art Subject, Film Subject, Written Work Subject into a single Media Subject type and still keep the properties for Film Subject, Art Subject, Book Subject for the Film, Artwork and Written Work types.
-
Merging all the "subject" types into one giant "subject" type, with properties for each expected type would probably work. (If we kept all the old keys around, the change might even be transparent to API users.) One caveat is that non-commons types expecting a subject would still need Foo Subject types if they wanted the properties to be reciprocated; these types would then have to be merged with Media Subject, rather than simply moved to a new domain, if they were promoted.
-
Did we ever really resolve this?
-
It's still just a thought, a good one I think.
-
I'd like to get some more opinions on this, since there are several type structures with a similar pattern (genres being the main one), so I'm going to ask the data-modelers' list.
-
I noticed that "Subjects" and "Subject of" properties were added directly to Topic.
-
-
-
I created a very simple schema that allow to define the presence of generic cultural references in a media work: Reference, source and destination I added some examples, almost all involving Lost episodes. Do you think that might be useful in this commons? Obviously source and destination can be merged in a single type.
-
-
-
In some cases cases the cause for a work to be non-extant today is known and can be traced to a date: a fire in August 1900, an earthquake on Jan 11, 1693, etc. Perhaps there should be a dated CVT linking a Lost Work and Cause of Loss?
-
-
-
Often when I enter quotations from fictional works, especially those that are part of a dialogue, I feel the need to capture the original audience. Often it's as important as the speaker. Even quotes from public speeches can benefit from an "original addressee" property. For example, a line from a presidential speech addressing Congress would sound very different (in formality as much as subject matter) from something out of a letter to the First Lady.
How about adding an "original addressee" or "intended audience" property to the Quotation type?
-
I guess I'm not convinced of the utility of this. But maybe other people would find it useful too? Anyone want to weigh in?
-
We have a source property already. Can a quotation source be an event?
-
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.
-
im doing this with [public speaking event] should be fine, unless you want to do a fictional public speaking event...
-
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.
-
Just thought of an edge case which breaks my suggestion of a new type - breaking the fourth wall
-
Yeah, addressing the audience directly is not at all uncommon in stage performances and older novels. I don't think that's a deal breaker though.
-
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.).
-
+1 on a new property instead of a new type.
-
OK, I'll do it: DA-934
-
All done: Quotation addressee
-
You da man, Jeff! Thanks a bunch.
-
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?
-
That was my intent, yes. Obviously, if there's a demand for implicit groups, we can change the documentation.
-
-
-
Hi,
I'd like to request a language property be added to Composition to indicate the language of the lyrics (if any). This would enable queries such as "Spanish songs".
-
I think that compositions should be co-typed as Written Works if they have any significant properties thereof. It’s not just languages, but subjects, etc. It introduces some redundancies, but if we were to delegate lyricist to author, that would get cleared up…
-
Is that really necessary? The majority of song lyrics really aren't literary gems fit for a Written Work label and applicable for its associated properties. Whereas every song with lyrics has a language value. Couldn't we just add a simple property?
-
We could delegate the property, I suppose, but once one cares at all about aspects of the text of a song, one is treating it as a written work, and the types really ought to reflect that. (BTW, in what language are Cocteau Twins lyrics? (-: )
-
Seeing as some of the Written Works properties will rarely if ever apply to lyrics, why not just delegate what properties are needed and useful to join Composition?
I'm against co-typing song lyrics as Written Works because that would make lyricists Authors, a type that would in turn get so diluted in Freebase to the point where Bernie Taupin may just outrank The Bard in terms of literary contribution!
-
I will delegate the subject and language properties from Written Work to Composition, unless anyone objects. Is anyone else even paying attention to this discussion?
-
Apparently not. ;)
Thanks, Chris.
-
Sorry, I was out for a couple days. Delegating properties from Written Work will co-type instances of Composition as Written Work (when edited via the client). I'd favor just adding language and subject properties to Composition -- it's a lot more straightforward.
-
Yuck, sez I. What is the point of delegating if it coerces types? However, it further supports my point that a Composition is a Written Work if it has lyrics. Do you share Faye’s opposition to co-typing?
-
I can see the appeal of it. But I do share Faye's concern that doing so would dilute the meaning of the already somewhat dilute Author type -- seeing songs listed among the various novels, plays, poems, essays, articles, PhD theses and whatnot will probably be confusing to some people.
I can think of at least one practical issue with cotyping them: what to do with poems that have been turned into songs like Blakes "And did those feet in ancient time" which was used as the lyrics for the hymn Jerusalem by Hubert Parry. Would Blake be the author of both the poem and the composition? That would seem weird, but merging the poem and composition also seems very strange, and wouldn't always work -- there have been multiple musical versions of Kipling's A Pict Song, for example.
-
Once again, the slippery nature of reality comes into stark conflict with Freebase’s objective model. The lyrics to a song really should be their own, discrete object, and could then be shared by multiple musical settings.
I also considered a new co-type as a compromise. However, one can argue that some musical works without lyrics per se still have language, as they may use words as musical components, and they can certainly have subjects without words. So I will just add these two properties to Composition and have done.
-
I have added a Language property and a Subjects property to Composition. I used Book Subject for the target of Subjects; it might be nice to reciprocate the property and possibly change the name of the already misnamed Book Subject.
-
I had a sense that this was futile… see Quintette for piano and strings, and a bunch of others. Probably warrants a clean-up task.
-
Re slippery nature of reality: Too true. The same problem really pertains to screenplays (teleplays, radioplays), alas.
Re subjects: Subjects are going to be globally improved at some point in the nearish future, but I can simply reciprocate the link for now.
Re futility: Yipes! Sheet music makes the whole model very interesting. Maybe we need a type for sheet music (or scores, or whatever the best generic term is) that includes Written Work, and also links to the composition(s) involved.
-
We have too many individual types, mostly for the sake of reciprocal properties. I wouldn't mind if they were all combined into a "media subject" type in the Media Common domain.
-
-
-
Would it be possibly to generalize Soundtrack so it doesn't expect a Film. There are soundtracks for TV shows and anime, and I could deprecate the Anime OVA Soundtrack type.
-
That is a bit odd. The description explicitly says that a soundtrack is for either a film or tv show, but the property is only for film. It seems to me that the options are:
- add a "TV show" property to soundtrack
- create separate types for Film soundtrack and TV soundtrack
- completely generalize the soundtrack type, and create a new type "Media with soundtrack" that will link to it (instead of Film)
-
Yup, 3, generic soundtrack with enumerated soundtrack types would be my favorite, or 1.
TV/Film/Game/Boardgame/Advertisements...
-
-
-
Many musical works left unfinished by their authors were completed later by other composers. How about "Completed by" as a property for this type ?
Glad you are back !
-
Thanks! That's an excellent idea. It would be good to find a way to link to topics for completions of the work, too.
-
Brilliant idea, but I have no clue how this can be done, I leave it up to you.
-
I've taken a stab at it here, with a little bit of sample data. Let me know what you think. I'm going to post this to the data-modeling list, too, since that was the original source of the "unfinished work" type.
-
Looks good to me, see what the others say. I added Bartok and Elgar to your list. Did you see "him" in the picture with the pope ?
-
Thank you, Jeff, looks very good, just in time for my 100 000 edits celebration!
-
-
-
Hi,
I'm working on entering quotations in the House MD fan base, and some of the most brilliant lines from the show are part of dialogues involving two or more people. What's the best way of entering these as quotations?
-
-
-
I think it's better to create a specific fields to contain data representations of quotations.
The way it is now (with quotations being recorded in the titles of their entries):
- it's impossible to query quotations by language,
- we can't input the quotation in other forms of data (we may be eventually providing audio tracks for quotations from movies and public speeches).
So my proposal would be some like
Text version: String, Language
-
Shomoa, I see you've made a couple of comments today about strings (names, quotations, etc) in other languages. As it happens, we *can* store multiple languages for things already. Freebase's backend is inherently multilingual, and when anything is entered it is tagged with the language used. At the moment our UI only supports English, so we only use English strings here, but if you go to any topic (I like coffee for demonstration purposes) and then hit F8 for the dev toolbar and then go to "explore", you can see that we have keys for most topics in a variety of languages. Or check out this translation demo that one of our people put together. As you can see, we have lots of languages already when it comes to names for things.
The problem, of course, is exposing all this via the user interface on the website. This is a way off yet, but it is on our radar, and it's becoming increasingly important to us as we get more and more users from other parts of the world.
-
Hi skud, thanks for the reply. Sorry for not knowing about all the translated stuff but it feels kind of hidden for the moment (as you say).
I don't really get what you say when you talk about a dev toolbar and hitting F8, so I'll ask you directly: are "Kaffee", "Kava", "Cafè" etc stored as different topics in the database or are all part of a relation with the topic "Coffee", say in a table named ?
-
Yes, those are all stored on the *same* topic, the Coffee topic.
(As an aside, we don't use tables. We use a graph database, so it would be better to say they are stored as nodes connected to the "coffee" topic.)
Here's a direct link to the explore view, where you can see them: explore.
-
OK.
So I guess I'll have to wait for the translations being exposed via a newer interface before translating quotations.Anyway, I think you'll agree that actual works such as books and movies should be recorded as different "topics" altogether. They represent different works and there may be several of them (for instance more than one translation for the same novel).
I think LibraryThing.com had this right and I see that in this database too books translations are new entries.But what about movies? Should localizations of movies be added as title translations only? Is that really the right choice? You Americans (assuming you are from the US) usually don't dub foreign movies (apart from some animations) but here in (most countries of) Europe there is a solid dubbing tradition. Isn't dubbing equatable to books translations, although almost always movies get only one "translation" per country?
I wish to know what you and the staff in general think about this.
/OT
It sounds very interesting you didn't opt for a more mainstreamed relational approach.
Is there any performance with graphs when it comes to large amounts of data like this? I'm really interested.P.S.
You were right about we posting in very different timings. It's kinda late in the night here and now I'm leaving. I'll be posting again tomorrow. -
OK, with relation to our graph database, take a look at this blog post about graphd. One of the most compelling reasons we don't use an RDBMS is that our schema is changing constantly, but that article gives some other background and explains in a lot more detail.
I'm not an American, I'm Australian, though I do work at the Metaweb office in San Francisco these days, so I hope I'm fairly sensitive to international issues, even if English is my first language. I will wholeheartedly agree that Freebase is rather US-centric at the moment and that this really needs to change if we want to involve a broader community of contributors.
There are a number of steps we need to take to support international use. I see the following as the major areas:
- support internationalisation/localisation in the Freebase.com UI
- internationalise and localise the UI itself (ie. instructions, buttons, header and footer)
- make it possible for people to enter strings/names/articles in other languages
- load data from outside the US, eg. foreign politicians, films, locations, etc
- keep our data models international, not US-centric
I get involved in about six data modeling discussions every day and I'd say that the last point there, keeping our data models non-US-centric, is something that comes up with extreme frequency. All I can say in general terms is that the more people who stay involved in these issues, and advocate for an international point of view, the more it will occur. So please, keep raising these points!
Jeff will probably have opinions on the actual modeling for books, and I think some other people might pipe up with regard to your questions about Film. Unfortunately neither of those are my field of expertise. Perhaps you could raise the subject in each of the relevant domains?
You might also find our data-modeling mailing list to be of interest.
- support internationalisation/localisation in the Freebase.com UI
-
-
-
So a very popular trend in music in the past decade has been artists reworking pop/rock standards (like Paul Anka's swinging big band version of Smells Like Teen Spirit) as cover songs (tributes).
I would love to capture the relationship between source and covered version (sort of like adaptation in the media commons (should it be part of that type? Though I'd like to have a property that characterized the type of cover this is: identical?, revised, radical, language (english version of a foriegn language version), etc.
I guess another related property to consider would could be sampled song for samples as used in dance, rap/hip hop, mashups.
-
The Composition type is the key here, along with the Arrangement. A fairly straightforward cover, like those performed by cover bands, would be a recording of the same Composition. A reworking, like Anka’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or the Brown Band’s version for that matter, or Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is a recording of an Arrangement which is in turn an arrangement of the original Composition.
-
I wouldn't want to overload adaptation/adapted work for this, I don't think -- the additional properties would be too specific. But I think additional types or properties are the way to go with this -- I don't think the original recording artist of a song can be garnered with certainty in the current schema.
-
I hadn't seen Chris's post when I wrote my last one. I wonder if it's possible, though, with the current composition/arrangement types, to assert "cover-songness". A cover song, I as understand the term, is necessarily of a pop song (otherwise, a majority of classical, stage musical, opera, and folk recordings, and a great many jazz recordings, would be considered covers, which they aren't). Or in other words, I don't think that Jimi Hendrix's recording of the Star Spangled Banner would really be considered a cover, any more than one by Kate Smith be.
-
-
-
There was some modeling being done in June 2007 for such video products like Home Video (videotape/dvd/online/downloadable content), Direct-to-DVD/Videotape, OAV/OVA etc.
I guess it got erased on sandbox and was wondering if any new/further efforts to classify such things as the direct to dvd sequals of movies, episodic programming like Star Trek: Hidden Frontiers and other fan-created shows that are not for sale, the big Anime market for Videotape/Laserdisc/DVDs of non-broadcasted/non-theatical works.
Then there is the new internet-online only shows which aren't really podcasts but attempts to do close to if not network-quality production to be watched streamed on broadband connections.
-
