Discussions on danm

Looks pretty good here. Introducing the concept of 'started' is a little funky here. I see how its useful but it begs the 'stopped' (from/to) closure that has always plagued this modeling convention. It would be nice if Freebase could easily display all historical coaches and put the current ones at the top -- we could do it but its a little manual and makes the query for 'current coaching staff' more complicated.

Net-net, I think this looks fine. Thanks for doing it!

I think its OK. Let's see if people use it.

I've heard from Jason about some of the problems you've been having with football coach modeling -- I'd recommend a simple model where the front office staff is stored in the employer type, employee property and the coaching staff is stored in the current coaches property, sorted by title. If this doesn't make sense, I can populate an example for you to show you what I mean. Net-net, I don't know that you need to create any new schema for this.

Yes, I'm inclined to create a new property for current coaching staff rather than breaking out separate properties for each class of coach. Along those lines, the thing that's a bit unfortunate is that we've got a separate property for head coach - but I think it probably makes sense to leave that as is. If you're cool with it, I'm going to go ahead and add that property.

More generally, I wanted to say thanks for the feedback on these domains. Curious whether you're most interested in refining schema or in populating data? Both? Are you more motivated in seeing Freebase get the schema right or do you have data that you want to load into the system and the schema isn't ready for it? Just wondering. Cheers.

I am interested in both. I have added quite a bit of information to these sports and I have noticed some different things that may make it better or even easier for the average user that comes across Freebase. I am still going to try and add all the coaches for baseball, but I have not had as much time this week due to final exams. From there, I will try and go ahead with the football coaches. What do you think of adding me as admin on football? I think that if we had two admins for a couple of these bases, then we would have a better chance of answering the discussion board quicker. Also, it is sometimes better to have 2 heads than 1 when it comes to making these schema changes and additions.

Thanks

Division and conference were properties I added back when I first created the schema -- I later hid them when I added a more general model for it on the sports team schema. 'Member of' lets you query any sports team and find out what divisions, conferences, leagues its a part of. Its the same model we're using on locations... see the properties 'contains' and 'contained by'.  We could additionally have the properties particular to a specific sport or league but that would then display redundant information on the topic page.

Does this make sense? 

Sure. Thanks for offering to help, and welcome aboard.

fyi, Kirrily is drafting a help topic that will outline the responsibilites of a commons admin -- will send along when she's got it done.

Cheers and have a good weekend!

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.