Discussions on TV

Wouldn't this be better named as "his/herself" and aliased to "himself" and "herself"? You shouldn't have to run two queries to capture everybody playing themselves since you can always restrict the gender in your query manually.

Sure! Rename the topic and it will be done.

I find the varying usage of the words "Program", "Series" and "Season" a bit confusing -- it appears that in many cases the word Series is used to mean the same as TV Program (eg "TV Series Season" could be called "TV Program Season", right? unless I'm misunderstanding your usage. Plus "TV Series Episode" has links to both "Series" and "Season" but nothing to "Program").

Is that right? Perhaps the type called "TV Program" was until recently called "TV Series" and so the UI labels haven't been changed in related types?

Or I could just be confusing myself because we generally use "Series" and "Season" interchangeably here in the UK.

Right now I'm assuming the hierarchy is supposed to be:

TV Program (aka Series) -> TV Series Seasons -> TV Series Episode

is that right?

I know how hard it can be to model the varying relationships between episodes, programmes, series, strands, etc etc, if you want to see a few of our data models we use at the BBC, just ask.

You might regret it though ;-)

Brendan.

Your assumed hierarchy is correct. You're also right in your guess that the inconsistent naming is because we recently changed the schema, and obviously we missed a bunch of the labels.

I'd love to see how the BBC handles the modeling of this type of information; there's been some discussion about our model's failure to handle Doctor Who serials, and it would be good to see what else we're missing.

Only a year late... here's the BBC Programmes Ontology, built by Yves Raimond based on the BBC's internal data model:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/2008-02-28.shtml

You may also be interested in our programmes database, containing all programmes broadcast from about August 2007 onwards: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/

The idea is to release a machine-readable version of the /programmes site, marked up with the Programmes Ontology, some time soon.

Thanks -- that's a very interesting document. I like that they've modeled it as deeply as "episode versions". I doubt Freebase is likely to go that deep any time soon, but it's a useful concept in a lot of ways.

Superficially, it looks like the brand/series/episode model is very similar to our series/season/episode model, which is encouraging, and means that it should be fairly simple to create mappings between Freebase and applications using the Programmes Ontology.

I added "series" as a disambiguator to seasons; it is already a disambiguator for episodes. The trick with episode is that you have to make sure it's actually been entered in the episode -- it doesn't necessarily autofill that value.

The UI should be automatically grabbing the series info from the episode, so you need to make sure that the series link is set correctly on the episode.

I'm coming at this from the director's page (which I just typed as TV Director). Do you mean I need to navigate to the episode "This'll Kill Ya" and make sure it's typed properly before I can enter the information on the director's page?

I agree it's annoying, and it would ideally be auto-filled if the reciprocal value were already entered, but there are more properties on the guest appearance type than can be made reciprocal (at least currently). The series is useful information, however, if you're viewing the actor's page. If series weren't displayed, all you would see was the character they played and the name of the episode, without reference to the show itself.

No, I think you're doing the right thing. The typer was going off the Wikipedia infoboxes, which use the same template for Doctor Who episodes and serials, so the two were getting conflated. By separating them out, you're actually improving the data, so please! keep up the good work. If the "TV series serial" pattern is (or was) common, we should consider adding it to the public TV domain, but, at the moment anyway, I haven't been able to find any other shows that use it, so we'll hold off on that.

Star Trek also had serial stories containing multiple episodes, such as the following story below that was split into the third season finale and the first episode of the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was not happy about it getting typed as a TV series episode when I added it as part of the series. I think a "TV series serial" type would be useful in this situation.

http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000022ec00

This is a great idea, but it sounds like it may need to be expanded to include any multi-part episode?

If anyone would care to take a look at the type I created and tell me how to improve upon it for any multi-part episodes (it may already be...) I would be happy to make those adjustments so others can use it.

I think your model is pretty close to what we need, if we change the name to something like "Mulit-part TV Episode". The only other things I would change would be to make the links from "multi-part tv episode" to "season" and "series" be one-way, so that they aren't listed on the main series and season pages. (My thinking for this is that, with the exception of Dr. Who, it's not especially useful, and perhaps a bit confusing to have separate lists for "episodes" and "multi-part" episodes.) The "season" property should also be non-unique, since the ST:TNG two-parter that Faye found actually bridges two seasons. Otherwise, I think it should work fine.

Thanks for observing that some multi-part programs span multiple seasons, Jeff.

Instead of being a special case, a two-part episode bridging one season's finale and the next season's premiere was the normal with some of the Star Trek series (Voyager in particular). In terms of production and episode numbering though, they were considered two episodes, as were two-hour specials (like series finales) aired back-to-back. Nobody would say a typical season contains 25.5 episodes. That means a "multi-part TV episode", though singular from the perspective of a story, should be allowed to have multiple values for properties such as "episode number" and "production code".

I also would use it. I'm wondering though, could that not be generated automatically based on episode number? Have you (staff) considered adding the functionality for field that could be generated from a query?

We have considered it, but we've not had a chance to actually implement it. Generally, we assume that 'higher functionality' like that would be the purview of an application developer that's focused on a particular subject area, in this case Television. The Freebase app is really the 80% solution, where dedicated developers can do something far more specific.

I love the Colbert report as much as the next guy - does it really deserve its own type? Does this mean we might have types for all our beloved shows? Can we add 'Twin Peaks Episode' with a number of pie sightings and references to 'hot, black coffee'? 'Lynch films Films exploring similar themes'? Don't get me wrong - this type is a lot of fun, just wondering what it might lead to.

I don't really know that it will lead us anywhere we weren't already going -- this is an ability implicit in Freebase's design, and is one we already make use of in a number of schemas. I would actually encourage people to copy this model, because it enables us to model general types with properties that will be broadly applicable, while at the same time allowing users with particular interests to model and capture data that is very specific to a group of related topics.

And I asked the question that should be answered every time a type is added -- are there properties unique to the type that a group of people would want to use? The answer seemed very clearly yes. This is one of the many reasons that the scope of domains is actually so small. Some of them may have dozens of types or even more.

The "other crew" property on "TV episode" is intended to be used for this sort of thing (i.e., any creative or production role that isn't addressed by any of the other properties).

Good idea. Take a look now. It looks to me like it's only defaulting to the first property, which is now "Programs in which character appeared as a regular" (or something like that). Is this the best property, or would "Episodes appeared in" be better? I mention this because only some characters will have data for the "Programs" property, while all characters could have data for Episodes.

tough one... my inclination would be to lead with the regular appearances, however, so it looks good to me.