jeff

Croatia: Get Spllit in Dalmatia

2008-09-05T18:52:48.0012Z

I totally am into dalmational artworks

Croatia: Get Spllit in Dalmatia

2008-09-05T18:51:34.0021Z

Military: casualites

2008-09-04T22:52:28.0012Z

I agree that this is probably the right choice for now, lacking a more comprehensive structure. Any thoughts on what the expected type of the property should be?

La rondine by Giacomo Puccini - Third version completed by Lorenzo Ferrero: Split

2008-09-04T21:12:21.0012Z

Thank you, Bryan, we are discussing this now with Jeff per email and will let you know about the outcome. Cheers

La rondine by Giacomo Puccini - Third version completed by Lorenzo Ferrero: Split

2008-09-04T20:35:53.0012Z

I agree with Jeff. I am sure it was a tremendous event, but in terms of freebase, I don't think the topics should be conflated. The production of the opera and the opera itself should be discrete topics.

La rondine by Giacomo Puccini - Third version completed by Lorenzo Ferrero: Split

2008-09-04T18:27:17.0012Z

...because it was a tremendous event! It was the premiere of the third version of the opera, after more than 70 years of waiting for it. Besides,describing it separately does not duplicate any of the productions presented above! Please let us continue this discussion per email, there is a lot more to say about this!

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-04T18:09:52.0012Z

If Jounal Article were linked directly to Journal Issue, it would remove the need for co-typing it with Published Work. But otherwise, what you suggest would work. But if we do keep the existing Journal Issue model (as opposed to the CVT version under review), I'd be reluctant to undermine the existing Published Work/Publication model by creating a special type that used a different method of publication. (I realize that I'm already proposing this with the CVT model, and I do recognize the inconsistency; I guess my argument is that if the needs of modeling Journal Articles are significantly different from other types of publications the different model is justified, but if it's just a question of copying the current model onto different types, I'm not sure that it is justified.)

La rondine by Giacomo Puccini - Third version completed by Lorenzo Ferrero: Split

2008-09-04T17:59:17.0012Z

The opera itself is not the same thing as a production of the opera, and so they really shouldn't share the same topic. I note that you've already added several other productions of this opera as separate topics -- why do you want this one production to be treated differently?

La rondine by Giacomo Puccini - Third version completed by Lorenzo Ferrero: Split

2008-09-04T08:46:12.0012Z

Jeff, please don't split it !! One would never be able to find the pieces again. It is better to have everything at a glance. I beg you not to touch it, this is a big, complicated thing with many productions, which took 2 months to compile

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-04T04:37:43.0012Z

You could make a Journal Article type that includes the published work type. then make the contents of the Journal Issue type link to Journal article. That way any new objects that get linked to from a Journal Issue will automatically be created as Journal Article types. So users won't have to manually add the Journal Article type. The problem is that all existing articles that are presently of the published work type would have to be migrated over to being of the journal article type.

Lindsay Lohan: Incorrect Wikipedia abstract

2008-09-04T00:28:01.0012Z

Thanks. This is a known issue that should get fixed in the next wikipedia cycle. Basically, Lindsay got her mom's name as a /wikipedia/en key somewhere along the way. This, plus a non-wikipedia derived topic for Dina, caused the topic updater to put the wrong blurb on Lindsay.

I'm patching the underlying data now; it should auto-resolve after the next cycle.

Lindsay Lohan: And Dina Lohan has no description

2008-09-03T23:18:40.0012Z

Cross-posting to Dina Lohan.

Lindsay Lohan: And Dina Lohan has no description

2008-09-03T23:17:30.0012Z

Thanks for noticing - we'll investigate

Lindsay Lohan: Incorrect Wikipedia abstract

2008-09-03T23:16:45.0012Z

Thanks for noticing - we'll investigate.

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T23:04:15.0012Z

Thanks, Jeff, you've confirmed my sanity :) I'm glad I'm not the only one who isn't sure.

La rondine by Giacomo Puccini - Third version completed by Lorenzo Ferrero: Split

2008-09-03T22:23:57.0017Z

The opera itself should be split into a separate topic from the production of the opera.

Lindsay Lohan: And Dina Lohan has no description

2008-09-03T22:22:10.0010Z

I just checked the mother's FB topic, and she has no Wikipedia abstract at all.

Lindsay Lohan: Incorrect Wikipedia abstract

2008-09-03T22:21:01.0005Z

The article from Wikipedia relates to Lindsay's mother, not Lindsay

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T22:18:57.0012Z

This is a tricky area for Freebase, actually. One of the underlying assumptions of data in Freebase is that there should only be one topic per thing being represented. Job titles, however, can be very idiosyncratic, and people occupying equivalent roles at different companies might have slightly different titles (especially something like chair/chairman/chairperson/chairwoman where the exact same position at one company may have had several different titles over time). So is it best to collapse all the variant titles into a single node (the way we do for college degrees), which essentially privileges the role, or do we privilege the name itself and have distinct nodes for slightly variant titles?

One advantage of the former is that it would easy to search for people who held the chair* position on a board. The disadvantage is that we lose accuracy of naming, and can end up with people having titles that correctly reflect the roles, but do not correctly reflect what appears in their CVs.

This is a long-winded way of saying "I'm not sure". Perhaps the simplest thing to do for now is just use the actual title, and "we" (meaning the Freebase community at large) can address (or not) the issue of merging later.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T22:07:06.0012Z

At that point, Journal Article would be nothing more that what we sometimes call a "bucket" -- a type that has no properties, and is therefore just a place to collect things that can be said to be of that type. There are a number of these here and there, but we try to avoid them as much as possible. In order for it to be useful, users would have to remember to add it themselves to each topic that is published in a journal; we're already asking users to manually add a lot of types in the publishing domain, just to use the basic functionality, and I have doubts about how much this type would ever be used.

I can't think of a way, through the UI, to filter out only those works that were published in Journal Issues. How often do you think people would be looking for journal issues but not other types of academic or scholarly papers?

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T21:10:00.0012Z

Okay, let me see if I understand. Currently, you can enter the journal article in the contents of a journal issue where it links in as a publication. And in published work type, there is the "published in" property which gets filled in with the journal issue. So there is no specific Journal Article type because there doesn't need to be one separate from publication. Sorry about the confusion.

So now I'm having trouble figuring out what to do if you want to search for only journal articles? I start by searching for published work, but when I try to filter it by the "published in property", it wants me to put in the name of a specific publication, it doesn't accept the type Journal Issue. I suppose that the sandbox version would solve this problem, but at the expense of not being able to record issue level information. It might still be more user friendly to have a journal article type under the current system even if the journal article type has no extra properties above and beyond published work. It would simply allow for distinguishing journal articles from other publications at a glance.

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T21:06:10.0012Z

1 - Damn, forgot about those other titles. Who knew this title could be so complicated?? I guess the question is, if someone's title is "Chairman of the Board", is Chair the same thing? I think it works, but there's a subtle difference (Chair et al can be used for multiple positions, not just a Board title). Many CEO's titles are CEO and Chairman of the Board. So does "CEO and Chair" make sense? If not, then would it make sense to use Chair in the board title. Or am I splitting hairs?? (it is 5 for me so my brain is used up!)

2 - Thank you, that is very good to know!

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T20:45:21.0012Z

(To answer your actual question, the easiest ways to get the "chairman of the board" type to appear are to either paste the guid into the property field or to add the type "board member title" to the topic.)

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T20:43:57.0012Z

It looks like that topic is not typed as a "board member title". Looking at the existing board member data, though, it looks like Chair might be preferable. (I also see the existence of the topics Chairman and Chairperson. I wonder if these should be merged?

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T20:30:54.0012Z

For some reason, when I'm in the pick list to select the title, the topic you linked to does not come up. Any ideas on how to get it to show up?

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T19:51:30.0000Z

I can't think of a reason. There's already a separate Chairman of the Board topic, so you should probably just use that one.

Hearst Corporation: Hearst Corp vs Hearst Communications

2008-09-03T19:34:58.0012Z

Too many don't get the difference between subsidiaries and parent companies, even here at work. Or between divisions/brands and subsidiaries. Ah, the fun of corporate hierarchies!

Board of directors: Chairman of the Board?

2008-09-03T19:24:48.0017Z

Is there a reason the "Chairman of the Board" title is the same as the Board of Directors topic? If not, then I'll create a new topic so we can have the title separate. I want to make sure I'm not missing something before I do that. Thanks

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T19:17:23.0012Z

The issue isn't about having both an article type and an issue type -- we already have those (see the help topic Entering Scholarly Works and Citations for an explanation of the current model). The issue is how to best represent the publication information of an article -- whether by omitting the issue type entirlely, and just using a CVT to capture the basic bibliographic information, like you would see in a bibliography (or bibtex or similar format), or whether to have an explicit topic for every journal article.

There is not, alas, a way to display the information in chained links. You can display disambiguating properties from the expected type of a property only. So in the sandbox version, the volume, issue, etc. are properties on the Journal Publication type, and so can be displayed on the article and journal types the connect to it. But the way we otherwise handle publications is by using the "published work" and "publication" types, which have to be set as co-types on the article and issue. Because the expected type is not explicitly "journal issue", properties on "journal issue" are not displayed on the article or journal.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

Hearst Corporation: Hearst Corp vs Hearst Communications

2008-09-03T17:51:45.0012Z

I say go for it. Create the topic for Hearst Communications, and add it as a subsidiary to Hearst Corp. The WP articles for companies frequently fail to clearly distinguish between companies and subsidiaries, but since the article is primarily about Hearst Corp., I think just creating fresh topic for Hearst Comm. will work fine.

Hearst Corporation: Hearst Corp vs Hearst Communications

2008-09-03T16:33:27.0017Z

This wiki topic is titled Hearst Corporation however the text references Hearst Communications Inc.

Hearst Corp has many subsidiaries that are not directly related to Hearst Communications, like Hearst Broadcasting, The National Magazine Company, etc.

Therefore, I think Hearst Corp and Hearst Communications Inc should be two separate topics.

Publishing: Book edition properties

2008-09-03T15:29:52.0017Z

I wonder whether there should be an optional editor property for book editions. I just added the book, The Right and the Good, by D.W. Ross. It was originally published in 1930 with no editor. It was re-published in 2002. The 2002 edition was edited by Philip Stratton-Lake. Given the current schema I had to put Philip Stratton-Lake as editor of the book, but this is misleading because it makes it appear that Stratton-Lake was the editor of the 1930 original.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T00:31:03.0012Z

I like the way the sandbox version looks, but I'm not sure I understand the concern about the schemata coming apart if you have both and issue type and an article type. You wouldn't store the issue information separately in the article type, you'd just link to the issue, and the issue in turn links to the Journal.

i.e.,

Object of Article type has a property "Published in" linking it to an object of Journal Issue type

Object of Journal Issue type has a property "Journal" linking it to a journal.

What I'm not sure about, because I'm new to freebase, is whether there is a good way to display the information if links are chained in this way. If you set up the types in the way I've suggested, can you look at a journal article and see both the issue and the journal that that issue links to?

Maybe there's something I'm not getting about your concern about schema getting out of sync. Please let me know as I'm anxious to learn more about how things work around here.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T00:07:30.0012Z

The proposed schema is on sanbox again, here this time:

https://sandbox.freebase.com/type/view/book/journal_publication

Field Of Study: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T22:04:48.0000Z

That seems pretty reasonable to me, so I added the two properties to the Field of Study type.

Education: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T22:04:48.0000Z

That seems pretty reasonable to me, so I added the two properties to the Field of Study type.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-02T21:57:56.0012Z

I see your point about the theme and target-article issues, and why it would be useful to be able to view the contents at the issue level in those cases. Although if you know the issue/volume/date information, you could use the filter view of the CVT to recreate a table of contents (there would be nothing anywhere that said, however, that "This is the X-themed issue of Y journal". I am more than a bit concerned about using both schemata simultaneously -- I worry both that the two schemata would fall out of synch very quickly, making it harder for users to use the bibliographic data, and also that someone might figure out a way to keep them in synch (via some automated process), which would eat up a lot of extra space.

I'd be curious to hear more of your thoughts on this.

I'll repost the schema to sandbox either later today or tomorrow (the data on sandbox is due to be refreshed in an hour or so).

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-02T20:04:54.0012Z

I think it might be going too far to eliminate the issue type, although I agree that for most purposes the article is what matters. Some journal issues deal with a set theme or with responses to a target article. For example, The American Journal of Bioethics always sets one or more target articles that other contributors respond to. So it might be useful to keep journal issue as its own type to enable tacking this kind of issue-level information. I don't know the system well enough yet to know whether this information can be stored in a CVT or if it needs a standard type. It might make more sense to eliminate the issue type for newspapers, since generally there is no theme to the content of a single newspaper issue.

Book: Feild of study

2008-09-02T19:53:19.0000Z

Thank you, you're right that does seem to cover it. I'm still getting used to the way that co-typeing works (i.e., that something can be both a feild of study type and a book subject type).

Education: Feild of study

2008-09-02T19:53:19.0000Z

Thank you, you're right that does seem to cover it. I'm still getting used to the way that co-typeing works (i.e., that something can be both a feild of study type and a book subject type).

Military: casualites

2008-09-02T18:33:28.0000Z

We have no plans for another way to represent citation data. We always have to be careful about schema bloat, but in this case it seems useful and important to source casualty statistics.

I do think the source in this case should be "who estimated it" (the government or organization), rather than "who printed it" (the book or journal).

Military: casualites

2008-09-02T18:19:44.0012Z

My concern is that modeling it this way sets a precedent for putting sourcing data in a CVT for any property, since a great deal of the information we store is similarly dependent. Certainly, many numeric values are going to vary based on who's doing the measuring and how, and I can envision people wanting citation information on practically any kind of assertion. I think the data team has been working on ways of handling attributions, but I don't know if they've addressed this case.

Book: Feild of study

2008-09-02T17:40:31.0012Z

All books have a subject property, which seems like it should be sufficient. (The property is actually on the type "written work", but all books should have that type as a co-type.)

Education: Feild of study

2008-09-02T17:40:31.0012Z

All books have a subject property, which seems like it should be sufficient. (The property is actually on the type "written work", but all books should have that type as a co-type.)

TV: TV episode performance limitation

2008-09-02T15:31:48.0012Z

The next release? Actually, it seems like there's a lot in there already that seems helpful - in particular the description field looks like it's included in the match. Quite handy, since many of the source wikipedia articles were obviously written to a particular template.

I just gave this a try and intended to type "tenth episode of the fourth series..." etc to get a match. I only needed two words to get what I needed as one of the suggestions :) Great stuff, thank you.

Publishing: Fair use of academic journal indexes

2008-09-02T15:17:36.0017Z

It would be great to have some serious bibliographic data on academic journal articles. Would it be within copyright law to download biblographic data from a proprietary index and then use a custom script to extract and repackege the data into a freebase friendly form and then to bulk upload the lot?

It seems to me that as long as the information in the index which is uploaded is information that is available freely to be public, this should not be a violation of copyright. Obviously a distinction would have to be made between those indexes which simply provide publically available bibliographic data and those which actually generate content that could be considered proprietary (e.g., an index which provides an abstracting service).

Would any copyright experts care to weigh in on this?

Publishing: Journal article type

2008-09-02T15:04:24.0017Z

There doesn't appear to be a type for journal article. There is journal issue, but this doesn't quite cover it. It would be very useful for academic research to have a journal article type which would be for a specific journal article.

Education: Fair use of academic journal indexes

2008-09-02T14:56:47.0019Z

It seems to me that as long as all the information in the index is available freely to be public, this should not be a violation of copyright. Obviously a distinction would have to be made between those indexes which simply provide publically available bibliographic data and those which actually generate content that could be considered proprietary (e.g., an index which provides an abstracting service).

Would any copyright experts care to weigh in on this?

Guitar Player: Wanderlust

2008-09-02T05:58:28.0015Z

Wanderlust is Craig's 5th album and features 12 new original guitar instrumentals. The title track was written by Sir Paul McCartney and featured on the "Tug Of War" album in 1982.

Samples available on Myspace and at www.craigpaynemusic.com

Ethics: Data on ethics cases / thought experiements

2008-09-02T01:12:53.0018Z

The contemporary ethics literature is full of thought experiments that are used to support various moral claims. As far as I know there is no database or index which catalogues these ethics cases and the uses to which they are put. It would be a big help to philosophy students and moral theorists to have this kind of a data available in a powerfully searchable format.