Discussions on Soccer

Also type-able as Football League Season. I've just been going through some of those topics and typing them as such.

Unfortunately there are 900+ team participation topics which fit the pattern for delete.

My fault, the Team property was still labelled Current Team. I've now fixed that (but the key remains the same to prevent apps breaking).

The Team property of Football Player links through the Football Roster Position type, which is a time mediator and has from and to dates on it.

Good idea, and a simple change.

I've added a Total Career Appearances property, a Total Career Goals property (for all appearances and goals - club & international), a Total International Appearances property and a Total International Goals property to Football Player.

I've also added an Appearances property & Total goals to the Football Roster Position CVT, as I noticed wikipedia had stats per a players tenure with a team.

Thanks skud.

As much as I'd like to go crazy with my new powers and move everything to the commons, I'll hold back as I'd like some critical review of the types I mashed together in the association football base earlier today.

Well, since you asked... :)   Bear in mind that I know exactly zilch about association football, other than which three English teams contain swear words in their names (which is what you learn when Billy Bragg is your main entree into the sport).

I notice that there is no direct relationship between players and teams (only via squad or match), and that in the case of Manchester United, you've co-typed it as both a squad and a team, which seems confusing based on the type descriptions.

Should soccer field include sports arena?

For goals, I think the disambiguator "team" is ambiguous -- at a glance it's not clear whether that's the player's team or the team the goal is credited to.

A soccer league does not seem to contain any teams.

Why is a soccer league also a soccer competition?

Soccer competition's property "seasons" expects "Event" rather than Soccer Soccer competion season.

Speaking of soccer competition season, the "matches" property should probably be reciprocated on the Match type.

But overall this is a very impressive schema!

Maybe add attendance to the soccer match type?

If possible, it'd be great if these types could inherit properly from the existing sports events/sports league championship events .. 

i.e. a soccer match (is a) sports event (is an) event .. a soccer championship event (is a) sports league championship event (is a sports event) (is an) event ..and so on ..

I'd mainly like this to reduce data duplication across types, and to enable querying across sub-types i.e. give me all the sports events held at Wembley in 2008 (although I suppose this is possible at the moment, but there is some duplication of data required i.e. location, date/time etc)

Just to add: 

The "sports league championship" type naming is probably misleading but the schema does fairly accurately describe all football cup events (Essentially the FA cup is a league championship for the FA associated teams, and the 1999 FA Cup Final was for the 2008-2009 FA Cup Season)  

The biggest difference for football I can see is in the multi-format competitions (although these are similar to american sports which the sports event types seem to have been created for) where you start with a league format and then a set of play off matches to arrive at a single winner i.e. world cup, euros, champions league

>I notice that there is no direct relationship between players and teams (only via squad or match) 

I've added a time-mediated property soccer player tenure.

 >and that in the case of Manchester United, you've co-typed it as both a squad and a team, which seems confusing based on the type descriptions. 

Now fixed, I've split the squad from the team.

 >Should soccer field include sports arena? 

now typed with sports facility.

>For goals, I think the disambiguator "team" is ambiguous

 now called "point awarded to"

>A soccer league does not seem to contain any teams.

I've created soccer league participation which is time-mediated using seasons instead of dates. 

>Why is a soccer league also a soccer competition?

This was where I was having issues.  I'm trying to get my head around the Sports commons and also get some abstract inheritance in. I was trying to make league competitions different from cup competitions, and possibly different from multi-format competitions - yet all have a common inheritance from soccer competition.

>Soccer competition's property "seasons" expects "Event" rather than Soccer Soccer competion season.

fixed this. 

>Speaking of soccer competition season, the "matches" property should probably be reciprocated on the Match type.

now reciprocated. 

 >If possible, it'd be great if these types could inherit properly from the existing sports events/sports league championship events .. 

absolutely, my problem is that I'm not too familiar with the sports commons. But if you could point out which types to include, I'll update the schema.  I've done soccer match now.

I've also added a schema for player transfers and loans. 

All my types are still in association football, and I'd appreciate any further comments on the types.  If we feel some of the types/properties are OK I will start replicating them in the soccer commons.  (with the plan to eventually move everything over and delete association football).

I'm planning to move the schema from association football over the next few days.

If anyone has further comments or improvements to the schema, please let me know.

Job done!  The schema is now up and running in the soccer commons.

Hopefully I got everything from football association across (I purposefully left out squads and competition season types as I think they're a bit flaky), but let me know if there's something wrong. 

Ideas for the next feature are welcome :)

OK, some thoughts...

 We could simply include the sports league championship type, which would cause all competitions to be co-typed as sports league championships, but are all competitions championships?  I don't know the semantics here.

 Another thing to think about wrt included types... are such competitions events, recurring events, or anything like that?  I note that some are already co-typed as such.  It seems reasonable that any given competition would have a start and end date and whatnot.

 Or... another thought... should this type be used for "World Cup" or for "2008 World Cup"?  Seems to me we've got the event/recurring event pattern going on here.  Perhaps we should have two types?

I did get confused with the two types, and you helped with your explation, so do I get this right (to use baseball):

* The World Series is a "recurring event"

* The 2008 World Series is an "event"

?

If that's the case, then football is littered with these so could do with some clarification.

I guess at the same time, does the "2008 MLB Season" then is a "sports league season", with "2008 World Series" as it's "championship"?

But then for the 2008 World Series (http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000006b8b47a), I don't get why it's a "sports league championship event", and an "event". Why doesn't one include the other?

I've added a few football events to the following .. http://www.freebase.com/view/en/fa_cup

I think there is a fundamental problem with the way all of these schema types are inheriting from each other .. Personally I think that we need a general "Sports Competition" from which both "Football Competiton" and "Sports League" derive. It would probably be enough just to rename/alias the Sports League Championship types, as the only thing that is wrong at the momentis the semantics - i.e. League and Season, It should just be Sports Championship (or Competition) and Season should be ok, but needs a more general term such as Period/Instance/Term

Hi degsy,

 I've forwarded your message onto the proper data loading folk, and hopefully they should be posting back to you shortly.  It would be great to load some more football teams into freebase.  I see yo've already started looking at the schemas in the /soccer domain; do you have other recommendations for changes?

I guess I have lots of recommendations for changes, but my problem was that some suggestions from 2007 hadn't been actioned, so didn't want to waste my time (or others) if nothing was going to come of them.

I have spent 5 years gathering data for my site, and have a good idea of what data/properties I have, so will continue to make suggestions where applicable, on the relevant type pages - I assume that's the correct way?

Would love to help out "officially" in some capacity, especially where football is concerned.

You're right - a good way to start contributing is by exactly what you've been doing.  Start with a post to get the /soccer admins (and hopefully others) involved.  There are some current schema issues that are outstanding, one of which happens to be how to represent past team rosters.  Posting suggestions for changes will at least get the ball rolling.  Additionally, you can broadcast harder schema related problems to a wider audience by joining the data-modeling list (here)

As for the suggestions from 2007, I don't know what the blockage is/was.  It could be some combination of dropping the ball, lost interest, no follow-up, no time and/or no resolution.  I'll have to research further what these suggestions were and queue them up, if appropriate.  However, I hope this won't stop you from posting your suggestions; community input is invaluable, even if it's just commenting/critiquing other people's suggestion.  

Thanks for the information.

I'm also a computer programmer (broad term I know!), so I'm interested in this from many angles one of which is how to get my data in here (for others) and then to use it from my own site to keep it fresh (from others).

I'll keep doing what I'm doing, but already finding duplicate types listed for some items, and trying not to become too frustrated, and to help out like you said.

Past team rosters are one thing, but also past competitions seem to be neglected (in my interested area) which I'm trying to think about how to correct.

One question, is it best to suggest specific types (football/soccer) ones from the existing types (which seem to be great for NBA, MLB, etc) or to suggest changes to the existing "sports" types?

Hi degsy. I already replied to a bunch of your comments in the football domain but I wanted to clarify a few things here.

First up, danm and aseem were the admins on the football domain but they don't have much time to work on it.  So cheunger and I have become admins there and we can now make changes to the schema.

Generally we don't appoint admins who don't have schema modelling experience on Freebase as it's easy to break things horribly if you're not careful.  So if you'd like to become an admin in this domain the way to move towards that would be to work on some modeling in your own private user domain(s), and get the hang of how our schema editor works, and so on.

However, we could make you an "Expert" in the football domain, which allows you to make changes to documentation in the domain and recognises your knowledge in the area.

hi skud,

I'll get to your comments in the football domain but want to thank you for your comments (both here and in the relevant types).

I guess I wasn't really angling for an admin role (although would love to be paid to do this! :P) but mainly that I've been using Freebase for 1 1/2 years (only really adding data for the last week though in anger!) and have been active in my space (Scottish football) for 5 years and a computer programmer for 14 years.

I do want to prove myself as competent, and have started a "scottish football" domain and will start to define types in there that I think work for football, as you say.

At the same time, I don't want to annoy people by posting a load of messages to domains that didn't appear to being looked after, but you've answered that above.

Looks fairly pointless, yes.  It's what we call a "bucket" -- something where the only useful semantics gained from typing something as this are that a thing "is-a" whatever. 

At the very least this type should include "Sports Association".

 Can we think of any properties that a football organization should have that are special to it?  For instance, do they relate to teams, or to competitions?  Can you say that teams are members of a football organization, or that a competition is run by them?

I guess to me on first look, any type that has no properties (but forces you to include another type on the item which fulfils the same purpose) is pointless, but I also see why that may be a bit harsh on it too.

Football organisation's tend to be silly (if I'm being honest), as they tend not to look after all the competitions in a given country (from Scotland for example):

* The Scottish FA, only look after the internation team, and the cup competition

* The Scottish Football League, look after the lower leagues, and the league cup

 * The Scottish Premier League, only look after the top division

Also, UEFA has "members" (the countries assocation), as does FIFA, whereas the "sports association" doesn't have these properties (only teams).

Football is such a specific sport that it deserves it's own type, but feel that is should extend the given type (sports association in this case), rather than require both to be added...

Still not sure of the best way of explaining this in words like this, if that makes sense!