I left a post in "Language" asking about a dictionary, but it seems like you're the only one responding in the past couple of days. I had noticed that there aren't any types for slang or idiomatic expressions and was wondering what FB was doing about grammatical issues.
A lot of subjects were pulled in through Wikipedia, no? (Seems like the default topic structure) So can we use someplace like dictionary.com to pull a dictionary into the database?
Discussions on faye
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It would be nice if Discuss had an alert or subscription feature. As it is, unless enough people internally subscribe to the RSS feed, replies to some posts may take a bit. I do see replies from other people elsewhere in the last couple of days though. I saw your post to the Language domain but was hoping an administrator would have insider info and be able to give an "authorized" answer.
Wikipedia is one of the open data sources we've been fortunate to obtain. Others include ChefMoz (290,000 restaurants), MusicBrainz (300,000 musical artists, 350,000 albums and 4 million tracks), and a film DB (whose name escapes me at the moment) with 55,000 records on films and actors. We abide by the complex set of licensing, copyright, and social guidelines, and only load data from sources that agree to let us do it (and are OK with our "open data" model). So yes, there must be places where we can get dictionary data, we just need to identify one that would allow us to do it and the resources to clean up and format that data so that it can be fed into Freebase. This is not an area we're currently working on (Book and Biology are target domains I think), so I can't give you an estimate. I'm positive we will have a dictionary (and probably grammar rules) eventually though.
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Wikitionary would seem like one place to start for dictionary data, but I'm not sure how clean it is. (I'm assuming not very.)
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I agree Wikitionary should be considered as a source for importing a dictionary into Freebase. Given all the exciting data import projects underway or on the radar internally right now, though, I think dictionary is a low priority. If you have an interest in this area, however, you're more than welcome (encouraged, really) to give it a shot.
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It's not really high on my list, I'll admit ;)
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Hello faye, I am sorry I couldn't figure out how to respond to your reply regarding Dark Frontier and Episode numbering, but this is my first day, so I'm still learning. I didn't even realize there had been a reply for some time. When I figure it out, I will reply, but first, I have some questions that I hope you can answer. 1. Is it possible to reference or link to an object in a discussion like this one? 2. Is it possible for a derived type to override a property of it's base type? In the test objects I created, the list simply contains both identically named properties. 3. Is it possible to create a derived type that shares a common value for a base property among all instances of that type? 4. Is there an IRC room, or some more effective means of communication for quick questions like these? 5. Is there something like the mediawiki watchlist or recent changes list on Freebase? 6. Will Freebase work with Opera web browser in the foreseeable future? 7. Just in case I can't figure it out, how does one respond to discussion documents? 8. Is it possible to preview? I'm sure all of these answers are in the Help, and I am sorry for wasting your time if that is the case. ;)
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I think some of your questions are answered in our documentation, but since you asked, I will reply. Let me take a keep breath...
1. You can reference a discussion page by URL. Just look at the URL in your browser. This page, for example, is http://www.freebase.com/view/discuss?id=%239202a8c04000641f8000000003d06322 Are you using Opera? In Firefox and IE (and I think Safari as well), you would see an "Add a Reply" button below each thread.
2. The type structure allows included types, which looks like inheritance, but as you've found out, is not. You can't override a property of an included type. It's "included" -- use it as a shortcut to include the properties of one type in another.
3. No. Types define properties for their instances, not property values. Also, wouldn't the need to define a property for a type imply that the value varies depending on the instance -- otherwise you're using a lot of space to hold a constant? :)
4. There's no IRC room. Your home page, however, should list replies to your discussion posts. Most messages I see get a reply within a day, or two.
5. The Types page shows popular types and newest additions to Freebase at a high level. We may have a page in the future highlighting topics that have been recently added or updated.
6. Browser support is something we continue to work on. As for Opera in particular I don't know. Let me get back to you on that.
7. There's a reply button under each discuss thread. You can also add a new post on the same page. From any topic page (such as your home page), clicking on the discussion header or the title of any post will take you to the discussion page.
8. There's currently no preview or edit for discuss although this may change. I believe the current omission of whitespaces like line breaks is a bug.
Finally, we have a pretty good new user demo video at:
http://p03.sfo1.metaweb.com/view/tutorial/ (video will start on page load). I suggest giving it a try some time. Good luck! -
Thank you for that information. I thought there might be some other way to reference than URL. I was looking at this page for a way to reply: http://www.freebase.com/view/document?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000054c596a , which has no "Add a Reply" button. Now that I am starting to understand the system a bit more, I see why that is the wrong place to look. I should have been watching this page: http://www.freebase.com/view/discuss?id=%239202a8c04000641f8000000004fb6335 . About included types vs. inheritance, is there plan to make that more like inheritance? It seems like overriding properties and setting default values for properties could be valuable. Thanks again.
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Following up on the browser support question: We'll try to support more browsers by the end of the year.
Regarding implementing inheritance, the system is not currently modeled that way. This allows the flexibility of removing an included type from a topic if needed. An example is the type TV Actor. Person is an included type because most TV actors are people. This means when you type a topic as a TV Actor, it automatically gets co-typed as a Person as well through the included type, as a shortcut. However, for the occasional non-human Actor (Lassie, killer whale from Free Willy, etc.), you can simply click on the Type property of that topic and select to remove the type Person. A system of inheritance, on the other hand, would have limited TV Actor to people only, too restrictive for this case.
I hope that makes sense. Oh, I should tell you that there's a more structured way of providing feedback to us. You can report a bug or post a feature request using the following link:
http://www.freebase.com/view/feedback
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It is possible to get some metrics on traffics to freebase and what type of users are using the site? I think it will be helpful to generate interests for populate and update certain types of domain data.
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Hi, we don't have public metrics on traffic to Freebase yet. Sounds like a good idea. The Home page does list the total stats in terms of number of domains, topics, etc. in Freebase. The Types page lists the most popular types and tallied number of topics for each type. I hope that gives you a high-level idea of how much data is coming into Freebase.
To view a map of Freebase users by location, try this application developed by a user: http://www.hamstersoup.com/freebase/GoogleMaps/Users/index.html?searchStr=*http://www.hamstersoup.com/freebase/GoogleMaps/Users/index.html?searchStr=*
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Thanks for the help with type creation. Where are the part of speech types located (english noun etc.)? Is there a dictionary section of the database?
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You're welcome.
There's not yet a dictionary section in Freebase. A couple of weeks ago I started an attempt in modeling English collective nouns like "a school of fish", "a flock of birds", and wanted to capture the formula of "a of ". That motivated me to create singular and plural forms of English noun types. I very quickly realized, however, that it would lead to a much bigger project than I could manage. I was headed towards inputting a complete English dictionary and the English grammar rule set into Freebase -- a daunting task if done manually. Not to mention the fact that collective nouns also exist in Spanish and Italian, and probably other languages. Where would I stop? Seems like a much better approach would be to find a data source we can use to load dictionary words into the system using a script. So I put that personal project on hold and would like to talk to some of the data experts here before figuring out if it's something we could pursue.
I hope that's not discouraging. We don't have data structure to support a dictionary yet but we could. I will keep you updated.
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