tsegaran

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T16:22:47.0012Z

Well, I guess it depends on what we want to use it for. Do we want to use generic terms for multiple legal types, or do we want to be more specific.

For example, PLC is Public Limited Company. "Public limited company" could be used to cover all those types in various countries, or it could be for the specific Plc used in UK.

But unless you are intimately aware of what SA (Societe Anonyme) is, or use the Wiki page to see what approximate equiv is, then chances are no one is going to use this field (at least for "harder" ones). I deal with company names all the time, so I'm familiar with Oyj, AG, KgaA, etc, but I don't know what they translate to.

Either way we're missing values. If we keep the "generic" route, then we (I) should comb through the wiki page and identify the big ones we're missing, like "Limited Partnership with Shares" (for SCA & KgaA, for example). Though I'm not sure if all can be mapped (like KK, which is common in Japan, though I think it is usually seen as Co Ltd).

So I think we need to figure out what direction we want to take, generic or country specific, and I don't think either is an easy answer (either you have a long list of specifics or a hard to determine list of generics).

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T15:20:31.0012Z

Enumerated types like Company Type aren’t locked, they’re just a little harder to add to, in order to discourage accidental proliferation. Additions must be made through the query editor or some other way that isn’t the client. We do encourage you to discuss the proposed additions with the community first, though, to avoid edit wars on high-profile types. What specific instances do you think are conspicuously missing?

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T14:00:35.0017Z

Why is Company Type locked? There are many legal structures of companies, and even state-owned enterprises. But very few are listed here. Is there a particular reason for this? If so, it would be good to have that documented so those of us filling in company information know how ot complete this field. Thanks

Pierpoint Morgan Library: marked for merge

2008-08-29T07:40:50.0017Z

As of now there is no info in this topic. All moved to Morgan Library.

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-29T04:36:25.0012Z

Hi Shaki, and welcome to Freebase. Freebase is a structured database of information about people, places, and other things like that. It's not a political forum. If you'd like to contribute structured information about President Musharraf, such as his political offices held, places lived, etc etc, that would be very welcome. However, if you want a political debate, you'll probably want to go somewhere else for it.

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-28T20:45:44.0012Z

Ah, crap, I forgot to do that last night. So easily distracted :)

Thanks!

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-28T17:27:02.0000Z

I've flagged them for merge, and added Metallgesellchaft as a former name of GEA Group.

Commentary on Palestine Peace Not Apartheid: Book topic already exists

2008-08-28T14:48:16.0017Z

This is not a topic and the structured information is already on the equivalent book topic Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-28T01:41:08.0012Z

yeah, you're right. I guess I thought maybe there was a reason wiki had a separate topic for it, not being intimately familiar with the history. But based on the website it does seem like they should be the same topic.

The Linde Group: Linde Group & Linde AG

2008-08-27T21:12:02.0017Z

These two topics are for the same company (legal name is Linde AG). The wiki for Linde AG now redirects to the Linde Group topic.

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-27T20:37:51.0012Z

Company histories give me the biggest headache! According to their history, though, Metallgesellschaft acquired (the original) GEA in 1999, changed its name to MB Technologies in 2000, and then changed its name again to GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft. So arguably, these two topics are really about the same company, and should be merged.

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-27T20:21:25.0005Z

Metallgesellschaft doesn't exactly exist anymore and so the parent isn't technically GEA Group, but I put that in there so we can see the linkage of the two companies (see history here: http://www.geagroup.com/en/unternehmen/chronik.html).

Film: Movie Subtitles

2008-08-27T19:07:48.0000Z

Hi Ian,

Don't be discouraged. What you are doing is very valuable. Many people speculate about U.S. copyright law though they are not experts.

I'm not an expert either, but I work in the area of subtitles and film captions, specifically for accessibity for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in the U.S. - 30 million people. (About as many people as the entire population of Canada!)

Regarding your efforts and copyright law, one of the main issues is whether you are aiming to be seeking any profit from your efforts. If you are just seeking to build up an index of film characters and quotes, you are probably within the Fair Use doctrine, and can carry on, as long as you indicate appropriate copyright notices on the material you post.

In this period of global cross-cultural communication, your work has many possible uses which would certainly fall within the Fair Use doctrine of copyright law, including making available information needed for making film/video accessible to Deaf in U.S., Deaf in non-English speaking cultures, and non-English language access to films/videos not otherwise subtitled or dubbed.

I just heard an interview with David Huynh, new guy at FreeBase.com, and it sure sounds like he is making interaces to browse and view specific data details exactly along the lines you mention.

You might check out some sites like:

mysubtitles.org

dotsub.com

good luck,

Greg
owner
DeafAccessFilms.com

SABIC Innovative Plastics: Don't Merge with SABIC

2008-08-26T14:41:03.0010Z

SABIC Innovative Plastics is a business unit of SABIC: http://www.sabic-ip.com/gep/en/NewsRoom/FactSheet/fact_sheet.html

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:46:30.0012Z

Never mind, made a newby mistake on the filter setting.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:41:55.0017Z

Georgia is the only state that is not listed in alphabetical order. Don't know how to fix that.

Standardized Test: suggested properties

2008-08-25T22:17:21.0018Z

Maximum score

Minimum score

Average score

Subjects/Sections Tested

Lotus Cars: discussion about opel speedster

2008-08-22T05:44:54.0018Z

this is a discussion about the opel speedster.

all elises are slower..

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T23:40:12.0012Z

Yeah, I hear you. I was thinking of just an empty topic for use only with addresses. Ugly, but so is having DC missing from addresses. Maybe we should have a poll for which is worse :)

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T21:39:28.0012Z

That's going to cause some bizarreness in terms of data, since some of the data (like the properties on statistical region) apply equally to both the city and the district. To find out information about Washington, DC, users would have to know to look in two places. But I do see your point about the addresses. I'm not sure what the best solution is right now.

Bayer Industry Services: Renamed Currenta

2008-08-21T19:49:15.0017Z

Looks like Bayer Industry Services was renamed to Currenta on Jan 1 2008.

Periodical Publication Date: Issue as machine readable text?

2008-08-21T18:09:07.0005Z

Well this thread got completely lost. I'm going to see about actually getting this done now.

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T14:12:23.0012Z

I think we need to split this topic so we have "DC" to put as the state of a US address. (I get that it isn't a state, but it does belong in that field, just like PR.) It is odd because they are one and the same (I think?), but not sure how else to fill in addreses properly.

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-20T22:00:22.0012Z

Take a look here: https://www.freebase.com/view/user/jeff/newspaper and see what you think. I've filled out the San Francisco Chronicle with data in both old and new formats for comparison.

Film actor: IMDB entry problems

2008-08-18T23:09:41.0018Z

hello,

tried to add the Film actor to the following entry:

http://www.freebase.com/view/en/chris_hemsworth

i am asked, is i thought, to enter just the number of the imdb URL. but after a few refresh, i found out that the Weblink which was created was missing the NM before the number:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1165110/

when i tried to edit the weblink, i was unable to.

when i deleted it, i was hoping the IMDB open will re-appear - it didnt.

pls fix it, and add an explation as to what this filed needs to recieve.

Thanks,

Doron.

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-16T10:49:17.0005Z

I would like all of the readers to please contribute in your comments whether President Musharraf should resign or should he be punished for his deeds and acts and thrown away from his position.

Please comment what and why ???

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-08T17:27:45.0000Z

It could also address local vs. national editions (like the NY Times), which might be interesting to some people. I'll add a task for myself in the old refactoring queue.

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T23:47:38.0012Z

I was thinking something like that, where we combined the fields into one.

And I had no idea there were papers that still did morning/evening editions!

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T22:59:52.0012Z

That would also help modeling papers with morning and evening editions (the Providence Journal-Bulletin had this until very recently).

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T18:54:35.0012Z

Good point. The issue then is how to model things like price and circulation in a way that accomodates weekly papers as well as those that have both daily and sunday editions. We could do a CVT with value, date, and frequency (or maybe call it edition?). Papers with only one edition could optionally leave frequency blank, I suppose. Any other thoughts?

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-06T18:15:37.0010Z

Can we remove the "daily" specific nature of the Newspaper Type so we can use this for weeklies?

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-08-02T03:21:05.0000Z

After further investigation, it transpires that the NAICS and SIC classifications were added to /business/industry some time ago. So we plan to deprecate industry_classification. All the same info is available in the other type. I have moved the few current uses of specific industry classifications over to their corresponding industry and plan to retire the type altogether since its no longer in use.

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T19:20:15.0012Z

ooh, I think that works! I like how you have the options of indicating whether or not it was acquired, etc (which happens a lot). Thanks, Jeff

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T18:24:18.0012Z

Take a peek over on sandbox: I just posted a proposed modification to the company schema to handle divisions on sandbox. See https://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/remington_rand for an example (example expires Monday!).

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T15:42:35.0017Z

Seeing the Calvin Klein Underwear topic with the type of Company attached to it, made me wonder how we want to handle divisions and brands.

I believe the intent for the Company schema is to flag legal companies, like Calvin Klein Inc or General Dynamics Corp. So parent companies and their subsidiaries. If correct, then divisions and brands would not be assigned to the Company type.

If so, then we may need a way to flag topics as a division (or perhaps we do this somehow in the Company schema). Same with brands, which are not always separated from the parent company.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-08-01T06:49:59.0000Z

I think this is correct, that the generic product is not represented well by the NAICS codes. For example the closest you get to 'Petroleum' in the NAICS tree is:

Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing   324
    Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing   3241
        Petroleum Refineries
        Asphalt Paving, Roofing, and Saturated Materials Manufacturing
        Other Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing
             ... all the way down to
                   Petroleum Refineries 324110

Which is clearly not what you want. I do think though that the classification of companies is going to have to come in two flavours, the topic based /business/company/industry and a different property linking to the NAICS (and hence SIC and other codes that map to that same classification).

It would be very hard to merge the industry tree with the NAICS tree without creating new things that had no NAICS codes.

On the topic of NACE, SIC equivalences etc, the plan would be to load them all.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-31T22:11:28.0012Z

Import/export actually expects "industry", which is more general than "industrial classification". Instances of the industry include things like Computers, Consumer electronics, and Petroleum, which are values I would expect to see as imports and exports. I think this is the advantage of keeping the two types separate -- they have slightly different semantics which are useful in different contexts.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-31T16:25:26.0012Z

I'm not sure where to begin on this one.

It is not odd to have more than just NAICS, which is North America specific. NACE is used in the EU, and some countries even have their own classification (like France, the NAF).

And I know D&B still widely uses SIC Code, even though it has been replaced.

I am not familiar with all the codes in the type, but we should research first before removing any, to make sure we're not making the fields North America specific, or if the codes are standard for some reason that is not readily obvious.

As for Industry vs Industrial Classification, I know when I was filling in the Export/Import information in countries, using the CIA World Factbook as a guide, it was difficult or impossible to fill certain values in. You can't export "Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing", instead you export the actual product. So not sure if that means the export/import fields need to be changed or we need another field/category for the industrial classification (less doable)? Or we just live with non-intuitive values in the import/export fields??

Business: New properties

2008-07-30T08:41:14.0005Z

the largest China Travel company offer china tour,travel information,travel route, hotel booking,airline ticket , car rental, chauffeur service, beijing,shanghai,guangzhou(canton),xian,shenzhen,dongguan,guilin,changsha,hangzhou, shantou, qingdao,hongkong,taiwan,macau destination guide,restaurants,cuisine,dining,weather,shopping guide and other services.for more information please visit http://english.51766.com

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-30T08:36:47.0012Z

agree above guys

from http://english.51766.com by lisa

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T21:30:32.0012Z

Thanks !

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T20:33:59.0012Z

For a start, see the help topic Entering Scholarly Works and Citations. The short answer is that an article should have the types Scholarly Work, Written Work, and Published Work. Between these, you should be able to enter most of the properties you mention.

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T19:57:22.0017Z

An article in pubmed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ) can be defined by a journal (issn, abbreviation, title) , an issue ( volume, issue, date ) , a title, a pubmed identidier (pmid) , a doi , a list of authors. I'm lost in all those types. Dear Lazyweb, hat are the types that should be used to create a new instance of an article ?

Thanks

Pierre

Film: Movie Subtitles

2008-07-07T23:37:16.0012Z

Hi Ian --

Subtitles would be covered by copyright protection, so you would only be allowed to add them from films from the public domain or with an open license (such as CC-BY).

Copyright law, however, does allow small fragments from copyrighted works to be cited. I don't know what the limits are, but I imagine that many short subtitle snippets would be allowed per movie, perhaps from key scenes.

Also, aside from the contents of the subtitles themselves, what kind of metadata would you imagine having for subtitles? Freebase could store that information without restrictions.

R

Film: Movie Subtitles

2008-07-07T23:35:30.0000Z

It's great that you are finding a good use of our service! Thanks!

Our goal is to provide linkages between sets of data, not really to be a repository for data in of itself...

Thus we provide an excerpt of the associated wikipedia article as a blurb (but not recreate the entire article, that's what the linkages (and keys) back to Wikipedia are for. We allow for weblinks to sites that have specific and useful information about the topic but is of a restrictive licensed nature (IMDb for example).

Our database is not set up for large amounts of text. We encourage the use of text for specific notation about a specific property but not for than about almost a thousand characters.

Secondly, legality.

Your subtitles are a form of film script and would most likely be considered as property of the creators/owner of the film. At best they would be a grey area of legality to be made available in text form outside of the film, video tape or disc.

If it was a film you wrote and owned outright, and was published with an CC license, the providing the subtitles externally from the film would most likely be legal in that case ;)

What you could do is create your own type in your own private domain (default one or a more specifically named 'Film Subtitles' domain). The type could designed to contain what subtitles in what editions of the film (Theatrical Release/DVD/TV Broadcast) in what languages...Check out how the Film Regional Release Date is designed, though it may need not be a Compound Value Type.

http://www.freebase.com/tools/schema/film/film_regional_release_date

Film: Movie Subtitles

2008-07-07T07:50:45.0012Z

Hi all,

I have been using Freebase for a little while now to index my movie collection (where film information exist in Freebase) and, eventually, upload film information back to Freebase. I have subtitles for the majority of my films and think they would make a valuable addition to the Freebase Film schema (imagine querying for who said a particular line and in which films).

How would I go about adding a Subtitles schema to Freebase and linking it to the Films/TV schema?

Alternatively, if this schema already exists, could somebody point me at it? I searched but couldn't find it.

Cheers,

Ian

Business: New properties

2008-06-24T19:22:41.0012Z

A suggestion is to add an "End date" property to the Company_name_change type.

Business: New properties

2008-06-24T18:31:10.0012Z

Part of the idea behind topics in Freebase is that there should be only one topic for any given "thing". If a company just changes its name, it doesn't necessarily become a different entity, any more than when a person changes their name.

Business: New properties

2008-06-23T10:54:37.0000Z

I would rather that each different company name be a different topic.
The company type would have 'name changed from' and 'name changed to' properties.

Washington: us_state?

2008-06-17T22:55:52.0000Z

counties are defined by the state (with alaska using boroughs and Louisiana parishs). And since this isn't in a state, calling it a county seems odd.