Discussions on degsy

A football league in the soccer sense, is an event as such, as a:

* it recurs every year

* has a start date

* has "things" invovled (teams rather than people, which change each year - unlike some American sports I guess)

Perhaps event isn't the best type to include, perhaps football league just needs beefed out with the relevant properties instead? I can think and make proper suggestions for discussion...

After a year of inactivity I had more or less given up trying to use Freebase as my data source, it seems very flexible but inflexible at the same time.

My interest is in Scottish football and the wider football domain here, but have since started my own site to do the things I couldn't on here - which was a shame, since the opportunity to use this site would have been awesome.

Thanks for making the change suggested, I may revisit at some point and do further research here.

degsy,

Things have picked up with Football (soccer) on Freebase. There has been a lot of work; with a few thousand players, a couple of hundred seasons and a few dozen leagues being added. There has also been a lot of changes to the underlying types and schemas for the soccer domain, please take a look - any comments you have would be welcome.

Is your site http://scottishfootballarchive.co.uk? That's some fantastic work. I see it has unique URI's for each entity - it would be a worthwhile project to reconcile the id for each entity to the corresponding Freebase topics, or even importing the data if it's free/open.

hey,

That is my site yes, but I have also progressed the data onto http://stat.to/ which is where I'm trying to define an ontology for how the data interacts with itself but also other datasets out there (Freebase, DBpedia, etc).

I will look at your updated domain and see where it fits my existing (in-progress) model and send feedback.

In my dataset I do have the corresponding Freebase guid (defined as owl:sameAs), although it may not be exposed on the site currently - when I do this, it would obviously make ingesting to your system a lot easier... and I assume vice versa?

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.