Freebase: Discussion about rwmsn

Country: Incorrect ID

2009-12-14T15:11:19.0013Z

Thanks for the clear explanation!

I understand that each URI is really just a GUID of sorts, and the data works fine when requested by that name. It just looked erroneous to be using that one as the primary ID when I queried for http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/music.genre . It was an odd one out. I was a bit concerned that something with a UserID in the path may be sandbox data rather than canonic. Is there a way to promote http://www.freebase.com/view/en/country_music to being the 'preferred' or primary ID? ... Or not ... I see that is actually meaning a specific album name :-( . Dang.

FYI, the issue is: I'm testing a facility to import and reference shared vocabularies, and was planning to use the supplied URI/GUIDs as a primary key in an internal RDF triplestore. (Maybe I shouldn't do that, and just internalize the sameAs relations)

The given URI will still work (thanks for clearing that up) but just looked out of place in the diagnostic logs I was seeing. Partially (my fault) because my code is using the key found at the end of an URL as a temporary name for placeholder topics that haven't been individually fully retrieved yet. This is an ugly short-cut, but was returning sane results most of the time. My data queue listed : [ ... pop_music, trance_music, 00b3-10cd, breakbeat, black_metal ... ] ... I'll eventually be able to resolve that as I get the preferred name I guess. Just something to know! Thanks again. I think I'll be able to work with this..

Country: Incorrect ID

2009-12-14T14:08:44.0013Z

This is entirely expected. Each entity in Freebase can be referred to either by its GUID, or by an arbitrary number (possibly zero) of other IDs; there's then an algorithm which chooses the "primary" ID for each topic. Put simply, this algorithm chooses the shortest ID from the ones available, or uses the GUID if none exist.

In this case, the topic had not been assigned another ID (note that both /en/country and /en/country_music are used elsewhere), so when it was given an ID in Arthur's personal namespace, it started using that as its primary ID. However, nothing has changed here: you can still refer to this topic by its GUID or even by a number of Wikipedia keys, or even by its Wikipedia numeric article ID if you want. (The /wikipedia keys are never allowed to become the primary ID for a topic, which is why you weren't seeing those before). In the same way, you'll see raw GUIDs for any topics which don't have any other ID set.

Is this change of primary ID causing you a problem?

Country: Incorrect ID

2009-12-14T13:07:16.0014Z

Something has happened to this topic (Country Music). When the ID /user/avh/ellerdale.00b3-10cd was added to it, it seems to have taken over the identity of this resource. Now listings that include the concept of 'Country Music" Now instead include the concept of this odd User-defined Id

eg http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/music.genre http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/type.type.instance [ http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.pop_music. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.trance_music. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/user.avh.ellerdale.00b3-10cd. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.breakbeat. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.black_metal ]

I can see when the erroneous ID was added http://www.freebase.com/history/view/user/avh/ellerdale/00b3-10cd But I can't see how to undo it.

I'm spotting a few other oddities (raw GUDs) in instances under music.genre as well.