Book Subject

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.)

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.

Education: Feild of study

2008-09-02T00:16:42.0019Z

Academic books should have a property linking them to a feild of study, e.g., philosophy, psychology, etc.

Education: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T00:09:20.0005Z

Just posting this to crosspost this disscussion.

Education: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T00:06:29.0012Z

I agree. Currently, for example, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics are all simply "feilds of study". That's fine as far as it goes, but within the philosophy feild of study type we should be able to specify that ethics, epistemolgoy and metaphysics are subdisciplines. I'm not sure what a good name for the reciprocal property of "super-discipline" would be. Perhaps something like "is a subdiscipline of"

China: Medal Count by Country

2008-08-19T17:01:42.0027Z

Here's a query to see the 2008 Olympic medal count according to Freebase.

Agile software development: Agile Methodology

2008-07-08T07:20:24.0005Z

A useful whitepaper about agile methodology, download it for free,

http://www.aztecsoft.com/advantage_aztecsoft/thought_leadership/whitepapers/agile_methodology.php

Java: Paradigms

2008-05-13T10:49:10.0005Z

I think that "Strongly-typed programming language", "Virtual Machine" and "Write once, run anywhere" are not Paradigms. The first is a Java feature (of course) but it is also a feature of other programming languages, not necessarily object oriented. The second is an execution model. The third is a consequence of the second one. What do you think about? (sorry for my English!).

Ludwig van Beethoven: Composer vs. Musical Artist for classical composers

2008-04-26T01:20:38.0007Z

Welcome to my nightmare.

Every music database in the world indexes classical recordings by composer, basically because the physical record had to go in one place in the store. There is no reason for us to follow this model—except that our main data source, MusicBrainz, still uses it.

We will be changing this at some point, but I couldn’t tell you when. Do you have a specific use case or application that this is blocking? That would affect our priority.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Composer vs. Musical Artist for classical composers

2008-04-25T23:21:38.0012Z

It seems odd to have entries for albums and tracks recorded for a classical composer. Shouldn't the musical artist in this case be the conductor, symphony or other performers (analogous to songs and albums recorded by someone like the Rolling Stones)?

Ovenbird: Merge with the other Ovenbird

2008-04-22T01:23:41.0007Z

The permission for ITIS is currently set to "Global Write Permission" -- which is probably not ideal. It should be set to the same one NCBI has:

http://www.freebase.com/tools/explore/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000003cc0361

Sadly I don't think changing this will fix what's going on here though...

Ovenbird: Merge with the other Ovenbird

2008-04-21T23:16:44.0007Z

OK, the "enumeration" type is correct, but the inability to edit the property is definitely not. I've reported the problem to the ones one reports such problems to.

Ovenbird: Merge with the other Ovenbird

2008-04-21T22:15:31.0029Z

Bizarre. The properties for ITIS and NCBI have an expected type of the system type "enumeration" instead of "machine readable string" or something more normal for foreign keys. This is almost certainly an error -- I'll try to find out what's going on here.

Ovenbird: Merge with the other Ovenbird

2008-04-21T21:47:56.0000Z

Oops.

Shouldn't there be an ITIS and NCBI for the species? I tried adding the ITIS TSN for this species (726205) and Freebase would not store it.

Ovenbird: Merge with the other Ovenbird

2008-04-21T21:12:51.0007Z

Don't merge -- one is for the family of ovenbirds, and one is for a species with the common name "ovenbird".

San Francisco: Merge

2008-04-18T21:01:04.0005Z

This topic has links associated with it, so it should be merged with the "official" San Francisco topic.

Ovenbird: Merge with the other Ovenbird

2008-04-13T17:52:11.0012Z

There are two topic pages for the organism classification of Ovenbird.

Book Subject: Book genre links in under "Books About This Topic"

2007-06-04T04:29:37.0006Z

Got it. Thanks.

Book Subject: Book genre links in under "Books About This Topic"

2007-05-31T18:11:06.0006Z

The subject/genre confusion happened in part because "genre" was added as a property of "book" some time after "subject", so subject was doing double-duty for awhile. Note, however, that "science fiction" is a perfectly legitimate book subject (although not for "Snow Crash"), since there have been any number of books written about the genre itself.

Book Subject: Book genre links in under "Books About This Topic"

2007-05-31T04:44:01.0006Z

Actually, this happened because Science Fiction was already assigned by somebody else as a Subject of Snowcrash, which it shouldn't have been.

Book Subject: Book genre links in under "Books About This Topic"

2007-05-31T03:35:44.0011Z

Adding "Science Fiction" as the genre for the book links the book in the "Science Fiction" topic both under "Books In This Genre" (which sounds right) and "Books About This Topic", which sounds wrong. Have a look at the "Snow Crash" entry.

http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f8000000000035120

Education: Broader / narrower?

2007-05-19T02:24:48.0021Z

Perhaps a "Broader field of study" and "Narrower fields of study" or "Subdisciplines" property would be useful in organizing these? (i.e. Business Administration is a subdiscipline of Business)