bjimba

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T19:43:18.0012Z

This topic may be poor substitutition for indicating the absense of something, but the fact that it's extremely well-used in so many situations by so many different users suggests that it serves a real purpose.

Freebase, after all, is an open data community, and the community has found a need for a "None" topic. Unless or until a better alternative is provided, this well-used topic is simply too relevant to be removed from the system.

Please keep.

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T17:33:40.0012Z

On another note... even if we deleted "None", it would keep popping up again and again as people kept trying to use it.

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T17:23:39.0012Z

I disagree with Daniel that absence of information is sufficient. However, I agree that this peculiarly polymathic poymorphic None is a poor way to indicate it. As a concrete example, on my Person topic, I have no value for the Spouse or Children properties. In one case, it is because of privacy for the other party or parties involved, and in the other, it is because of a positive lack of value. A way to concretely indicate known, negative value would definitely be useful.

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T13:51:37.0012Z

This page should be marked for deletion. It serves very little purpose. The absence of information is a sufficiant indicator that a property is empty or invalid.

Candide: Play or Opera?

2008-10-02T07:22:29.0012Z

Neither !

Candide is first of all a novel by Voltaire in which he pokes fun at Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (the inventor of the infinitesimal calculus) and his priciple of philosophical optimism ("all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds").

Second, it is a comic operetta by Leonard Bernstein based on this book. An operetta is a little opera, strictly a play with songs, entr'actes and dances.The term has become synonymous with "light opera." Operetta is a hybrid between play and opera but a genre in itself !!

Now it is up to you how you model this...

Candide: Play or Opera?

2008-10-02T00:11:35.0012Z

And what about Rock Operas and where do they merge into musicals and... augh!

Candide: Play or Opera?

2008-10-01T20:16:09.0017Z

I changed some of the data here that pertained to Voltaire's original story (e.g. the operetta was written in 1956 or so, not 1759). But this topic raises an interesting problem -- are operettas plays or operas? Or rather than open up a problem that's presumably unresolvable (Wikipedia, at least, suggests that the boundary is pretty fuzzy), how should this one be modeled?

Candide has a composer (Bernstein), a librettist or book writer (Hellman or Wheeler depending on the version), and a lyricist (Wilbur). The musical composition type gives us properties for two of them (composer and lyricist); the play type also has types for composer and lyricist, and also brings in author from the written work type. The presence of a book writer suggests that it should be a play; the fact that it is performed as an opera suggests it should be an opera. We could just treat it as both, but that does leave some duplicated properties (the composer and lyricist properties, at minimum).

Thoughts?

Nautical Antiques: dupe.

2008-09-29T15:14:12.0005Z

Duplicates should be merged, not deleted. This topic has the Wikipedia identifiers associated with it.

Nautical Antiques: dupe.

2008-09-29T05:45:28.0017Z

of this:

Nautical Antiques

There's nothing lying around, it should be deleted.

Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves: Disagree!

2008-09-24T22:21:15.0012Z

Flag has been removed. In an upcoming release, when two topics get merged, the delete flag will get removed as part of that process.

All the King's Men: Why I flagged this article for deletion

2008-09-24T22:20:23.0005Z

Flag has been removed. In an upcoming release, when two topics get merged, the delete flag will get removed as part of that process.

All the King's Men: Why I flagged this article for deletion

2008-09-24T18:21:33.0012Z

This delete flag can itself be deleted now, since the merge went through...!

Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves: Disagree!

2008-09-24T18:19:45.0017Z

The deletion note is just lingering here. Now that the merge is complete (which was the original intention), this is not needed...

Musical Track: Lyrics link

2008-09-16T04:16:33.0012Z

The link on Track was hidden and unused because we weren’t sure it really belonged on the track.

On sandbox, I have removed it from Musical Track and recreated it on Composition instead. Two recordings of the same composition ought to have the same lyrics; one could make a very good case that if the lyrics are different, then one is talking about a different arrangement of the composition, at the least.

However, most lyrics Web sites do index by recording artist, so maybe this doesn’t work. What do you think?

As for external keys: that is something that Freebase is particularly good at. You can make a LyricsWiki namespace (e.g. /user/metaeducation/lyricswiki) and add keys to artists and compositions within that namespace. You can also make a URI template that automatically generates Web links from those keys; take a look at how the IMDb links for actors are constructed.

Musical Track: Lyrics link

2008-09-14T09:59:17.0018Z

Hello... I am trying to implement a system by which the lyrics for a song are downloaded from LyricsWiki via their API. It would help if the lyrics web link were not suppressed in the schema. That way, the assocation could be made from within Freebase. As it is, I must maintain a separate table mapping Freebase IDs (artists, songs) to the names given by LyricsWiki, and that's not fun!

So would it be possible to expose this field? I know that there is probably some contention in terms of which website be the "official" lyrics link, but if multiple links were allowed I would merely pick out the LyricsWiki link from that set...

Tx...

Steve Swindells: Welcome!

2008-09-13T14:13:17.0012Z

Oh - OK thanks. I'm still working it all out! Cheers. Steve

The Cheetah Girls: Split

2008-09-12T22:31:04.0017Z

This musical group should not be cotyped as the movie.

Steve Swindells: Welcome!

2008-09-12T19:40:19.0018Z

Hi Steve, and welcome to Freebase. I see you're off to a good start adding information about yourself, which we welcome and encourage. However, Freebase is a structured database, and the best and most effective way to add information here is to fill in the "Person" and "Musical Artist" properties. This will create rich interlinking between you and your work, and the rest of Freebase, and make it easier for people to find you. It will also make your information show up in search engines like Powerset, who use Freebase's structured data but don't scrape descriptions such as the one you've written.

I've started to help you structure some of your information already. Please let me know if you have any questions or need any help.

Delusions: Ignore

2008-09-12T12:37:54.0018Z

The merge that is

Delusions: Ignore

2008-09-12T12:37:30.0021Z

Ignore this, linked to the wrong album

Lord Buckley: Merge the two instances of the same person

2008-09-12T09:40:09.0018Z

All you cats and kitties, let me swing you to the latest news: Ain't no two hipsemantic masters! The Lord's the same in both instances, hence go forth and vote to merge them to make all Lord Buckley fans flipped and grooved and semantically pleased and singin' your praises to the Nazz.

(In other words, merge please.)

Percussion: Medical music! Split then merge

2008-09-11T20:14:34.0017Z

This topic about a medical examination technique got all the musical information associated with it. All that information should be split off and moved to the Percussion instrument topic (which could be renamed).

Music: Cover Song

2008-09-11T00:19:02.0012Z

I hadn't seen Chris's post when I wrote my last one. I wonder if it's possible, though, with the current composition/arrangement types, to assert "cover-songness". A cover song, I as understand the term, is necessarily of a pop song (otherwise, a majority of classical, stage musical, opera, and folk recordings, and a great many jazz recordings, would be considered covers, which they aren't). Or in other words, I don't think that Jimi Hendrix's recording of the Star Spangled Banner would really be considered a cover, any more than one by Kate Smith be.

Music: Cover Song

2008-09-10T23:06:22.0012Z

I wouldn't want to overload adaptation/adapted work for this, I don't think -- the additional properties would be too specific. But I think additional types or properties are the way to go with this -- I don't think the original recording artist of a song can be garnered with certainty in the current schema.

Music: Cover Song

2008-09-10T23:03:44.0012Z

The Composition type is the key here, along with the Arrangement. A fairly straightforward cover, like those performed by cover bands, would be a recording of the same Composition. A reworking, like Anka’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or the Brown Band’s version for that matter, or Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is a recording of an Arrangement which is in turn an arrangement of the original Composition.

Music: Cover Song

2008-09-10T22:42:45.0006Z

So a very popular trend in music in the past decade has been artists reworking pop/rock standards (like Paul Anka's swinging big band version of Smells Like Teen Spirit) as cover songs (tributes).

I would love to capture the relationship between source and covered version (sort of like adaptation in the media commons (should it be part of that type? Though I'd like to have a property that characterized the type of cover this is: identical?, revised, radical, language (english version of a foriegn language version), etc.

I guess another related property to consider would could be sampled song for samples as used in dance, rap/hip hop, mashups.

Music: dates and location of composition

2008-09-08T22:02:15.0012Z

ok - i'll look into the catalog numbers seperately in a classical music domain once i get around to it.

i set up a user domain for dedications (Dedicated Work). I think this could be generally useful (applied to literature and what not) and does not need to be directly tied to composition.

Place of composition should likely be non unique since there are numerous instances where the composer travelled while writing the piece. I think for modeling place composed similar to places lived is sufficient. Similarly, capturing a start and end date is also likely sufficient. Modelling compositions begun by one composer and finished by others is basically just hard (see this example) and happens infrequently enough that i think if someone cared enough they could break out the variant completions into seperate compositions. but for simplicity's sake, i think just having a date begun, date completed pair on the composition itself would help capture lots of useful data.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-08T18:01:05.0012Z

I meant remove the "Songwriter" from Cage's page not from Freebase

Music: dates and location of composition

2008-09-08T17:25:56.0012Z

As with most good user suggestions, I will say: Go try it out!

The question of catalog keys is easiest. Go make /user/arielb/koechel, and create an enumerated property for a Mozart composition type. Other notable catalogs (Schickele) can be similarly modeled. Opus numbers could be a machine-readable string, but probably on a Classical composition type; other compositions do not tend to have those.

The key, dedication, commission, première, all seem like good properties for classical compositions as well.

The date and place of composition is an interesting challenge, an example of a frequent modeling challenge in Freebase. Representing this information complicates the model when done properly; one really wants the composer-composition relationship to be a CVT. However, most compositions don’t have this information readily available, making it an unnecessary composition. Would it be acceptable to have the date(s) and place of composition simply depending from the composition itself? That would mean, for example, that one could not correctly describe compositions begun by one composer and completed by another.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-08T17:14:53.0012Z

With over 3,000 songwriters in Freebase, I do not see the utility in removing it. And when someone is a songwriter, why not say so?

The UI could use some improvement for property-less types. That is not a good reason to remove a correct assertion, however.

Music: dates and location of composition

2008-09-06T18:19:09.0012Z

and some more ideas:

to whom the composition was dedicated is often interesting.

who (person, or sometimes entity such as the san francisco opera) commisioned the work is also often interesting.

location, date, and performer of the premeir is also often interesting.

Music: dates and location of composition

2008-09-06T18:14:53.0018Z

can we add dates for when a work was composed (start, end)? i'd like to start building timeline visualizations of this. this is particularly applicable to classical music but could be generally useful. for instance a timeline of brahms's symphonys (it took him ~14 years to write it because he felt so pressured coming after beethoven's 9th).

secondly - place composed (probably non unique) would be interesting for mapping the works composed. for example - dvorak's new world symphony and american string quartet, and mapping liszt's travels. in general there's quite a lot of data on location composed particularly for classical music that we could easily structure.

thirdly - and this is more complicated, at least for classical music, we should capture the catalog ID - which for many composers is an opus, number combination, but for mozart it was K for Ludwig Ritter von Köchel and haydn and bach also had their own thing.

fourthly - we should also capture key for classical compositions.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-06T04:30:39.0012Z

Yes, I see your point, but it looks UGLY. Is there a way, then, of getting rid of the "Songwriter" from the page? If we cannot use it, it is better not to have it there at all. Why keep useless things? Please have a look at Cage, his page could look REALLY good if it was not for these 2 empty boxes.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-05T21:47:51.0012Z

The Lyricist type has the property “Lyrics Written.”

Some types, like Songwriter, are only used to classify topics, and have no properties of their own. We generally try to avoid them, but Songwriter was added to the system early on.

As I said in our earlier discussion, the notion of which compositions are songs and which are not is too subjective to easily divide. Many people regard Cage as a cutting-edge composer, and would consider calling his compositions “songs” dismissive. Rather than provoke edit wars, it is simpler to regard all musical compositions equally in Freebase.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-05T17:17:07.0012Z

Good morning, Cris, did you see my 3 wonderful philosophers on the front page today??

Sure, I can do that, but it is not nice to have empty spaces on the page. Look at Cage, please, what is the use of the "Songwriter" "Lyricist" boxes if we cannot put anything in them? It simply does not look good. Cage wrote songs...

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-05T16:11:46.0012Z

He has the Songwriter type, which as I said before is a shorthand for both Composer and Lyricist. Songwriter has no properties of its own.

He also has the Composer type with several “Works Composed” already entered. You can add to that list.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-05T05:41:45.0012Z

... then why does John Cage have the "Song composer" type without anything on it??

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-05T04:32:42.0012Z

Please use the “Works Composed” property of the Composer type.

Songwriter: Songs composed

2008-09-05T03:52:57.0018Z

Cris, please give us "Songs composed," I need it for John Cage. Thank you

Conductor: Orchestras conducted

2008-08-30T10:53:22.0011Z

Cris, please, we need "Orchestras conducted." Thank you

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T22:54:42.0001Z

Ok, thank you

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T20:54:28.0012Z

Go ahead and create a type in your own domain, then, as a prototype. We have generally eschewed types in the Commons that have no properties, but it is possible that your type will evolve. I would recommend that you include Structure and Location in your type.

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T20:13:33.0012Z

I am not thinking of any new properties, I only need the list at the moment

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T19:25:00.0012Z

Take a look at Micah’s draft Performance Venue type and Robert’s draft Performance venue as well. A concert hall is a kind of performance venue; what additional properties would it need that these Performance venue types don’t have?

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T17:47:05.0005Z

Cris,

we need the "Concert Hall" Type and a list of concert halls, please. There are practically hundreds of them in the world

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-28T00:07:15.0000Z

Why can't we have "Songwriter" with "Songs composed"? It makes sense and we need it

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T20:21:08.0012Z

Currently, Songwriter has no properties of its own. It is a convenience type which includes Composer (with “Works composed”) and Lyricist (with “Lyrics written”), as well as Person (with all its properties).

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T19:13:40.0012Z

Alright, I see your point. So what do we have now?

Songwriter with Songs composed and

Composer with Works composed ?

If so, then everything is fine

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T18:39:57.0012Z

But Billy Joel has composed classical music. So has Paul McCartney. It doesn’t make sense to shoehorn their classical compositions into a song bucket just because most of their work has been songs.

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T17:58:30.0005Z

I did not mean to separate the songs from the works "within" the same composer! I wanted to keep Billy Joel and Schubert separately!!

"Songs composed" = Billy

"Works composed" = Schubert

That's why we need both categories