Discussions on TV Program

Good catch. I see that "number of episodes" is also non-unique.  If there are no topics with multiple dates, this should be a quick fix; if there are some with multiple dates, it will take a bit longer.

well, sadly the reason I even noticed this was that the app I'm building stumbled upon one. The new Battlestar Galactica show (can't remember if it's miniseries or regular series) has two dates for first episode. I haven't found any others yet, but who knows. Coincidentally, the value for "release_date" on video games also allows multiple values. I've figured a way around this in my program, but I still don't know how you would sort the results by air date as long as they allow multiples...

Turns out that there are several hundred instances with more than one of either first or final air date, so this will take some time. I've opened up a ticket for this (and videogames).

Cool, thanks for looking into this.

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, crism? TV episode has properties "performances" and "personal appearances" which are for all people who appear on the episode, regular, guest, or otherwise.

The next question is (having capitulated to adding seasons to the regular acting performance), do we still need the "to" and "from" dates?  Arguably, no, since the seasons should tell us that. But sometimes we only have that data (e.g., from wikipedia infobox loades).

Since we're expecting to see a list of episodes, I think the plural makes more sense; I think it would look awkward if the label were "episode" and there was a list of several episodes below it. Unless there's something I'm missing?

From the Developer API:

Singular or Plural?

Note that the property we query in the example above is named "album" and not "albums", even though bands like The Police may well have more than one album. This reflects the underlying nature of Metaweb: the database object that represents The Police has many links of type "album" that refer to the objects that represent those albums. The type /music/artist aggregates these many links into a single set of albums, but retains the singular name "album" because that is the name of the underlying link type.

Also, as we'll see soon when you want to obtain information (such as a list of tracks) about one particular album, you specify a single value (instead of an array) for the album property. In this case, the singular name makes a lot of sense.

Although property names are typically singular, there are exceptions to this rule, and sometimes you'll see a plural property name.

In this case we have a property TV Program, which links to a property Episode, which is the name of the underlying object. I don't think this calls for an exception, if you read the explanation. (I didn't mean the label, I meant the property)

Interesting. You've just found a big discrepancy in our documentation. The help topic "adding properties to types" reads, in part:

Property Name
[...]
To add a new property, you simply click the 'Add New Property' button and type in a display name for the property. These new properties are displayed in the 'User Created Properties' section. Note: A display name must be unique for that type. You may also want to use a plural name because the property often contains a list of items (example: 'siblings' instead of 'sibling').


Since creating a property through the UI automatically generates the property key from the display name, this instruction is essentially the opposite of the one in the developer API. I'll see if we can't get some clarity on this.

David Flanagan wrote the documentation based on my music types, which were among the first types designed for Freebase. I tended to use singular for the property keys. The display names have since changed to plural, and this is definitely a better user model. So: plural if you expect that there will usually be more than one value for the property.