Literary School Or Movement

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-11T05:48:28.0009Z

That might help but I doubt it will ever be as intuitive or as used as author, publication date, publisher, editor, etc. Written work is a very basic type that is almost always co-typed. Adding a such a non-essential property to it just seems wrong to me.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T19:09:11.0000Z

Ed: upthread a bit, you mention that the property "school or movement" is not immediately intuitive. I think this may be the root of the problem. Coming from a literature background, it seems obvious to me. But it just occurred to me that from the standpoint of academic or scholarly writing "school" is a pretty ambiguous term. Maybe we should try to come up with a better name, and see how that looks.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T18:15:06.0007Z

I think you overestimate the utility of hiding unused values. In viewing one, you view all. Further, you don't get information for a property until you start to edit it. Further still, in terms of types, the relevance manager does a lot of the work by narrowing down types. For properties you need to look at and interpret them all. You could probably develop a "functionality" distribution curve based on the number of properties for any given type. How many is too many? There will be a too many. I'm thinking about usability too.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T07:57:36.0007Z

The only reason for moving date and place of death to a new Deceased Person type was that, especially in the old UI, it was extremely creepy to look at an instance of a person with those values just sitting there… waiting… empty… hungry for a value… The semantic value of a separate type was a much more minor point.

Especially given that the new UI hides unused values unless one really wants to fill them in, and given the comparative difficulty of figuring out which type needs to be added to facilitate using a particular desired property, proliferating types is really not useful. Sure, it may be more purely semantically clean—and I’m quite the sucker for that argument—but the usability is paramount.

Further, in this specific case, every piece of writing can be said to be in a school or movement, even the driest of non-fiction. So go ahead and, as you say, load it up!

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T03:07:23.0000Z

Welcome to the party Faye! I take your point but I still don't agree.

The deceased person type approach seems like a good one to me, although I might have kept the death date on Person because all people die. I can certainly understand the case for a Deceased_person type with associated properties but I can't understand why that case is perceived differently than Work_of_literary_school. I think the case is stronger for that type to be a separate one and not Deceased person.

The TV_program example is the same in that I would use an end date on the program type and possibly a "Cancelled_program" property or type for the details. Programs, like people, all have end dates no matter how good they are (see The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.). The details of the ending are tangential.

I would probably add spin-offs as a property of TV_program because the property is so intuitive and simple, even though spin-offs are not as common/universal as children and siblings. Plus, the potential for siblings, children and spin-offs is always present even if through adoption and/or nostalgia.

A "None" value could be used for siblings, children and spin-offs without asking the user to look up what they mean. The same can't really be said for Literary school/movement.

If you still don't agree, maybe I should start looking for other possible but not always relevant properties of written work so we can really load it up!? ;)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T01:05:13.0007Z

Grrr, my super-unsupported internal discussion RSS died last Wednesday, and I can't believe I missed this discussion (kicking myself)!

As the person who asked for the property "Poetic/Literary School or Movement", Ed, I have to say I agree with Jeff. It's just not possible to normalize types and properties in such a way that all instances of a type have values for all of its properties.

Now we do try to factor out the rather silly or morbid cases. For example, having a "Date of Death" property on type Person for people still alive just seemed wrong, so the Deceased Person type was, uhm, born. But this logic is applied on a case-by-case basis.

If you take a look at the TV Program type, you'll see that there's a "air date of final episode" property. We could've created a similar "Canceled TV Program" type for that and separate it from the TV Program type, but then why stop there? The type also has "Spin-offs" and "Spun off from" properties, but since most programs don't ever achieve the kind of requisite popularity to have or be a spin-off, why not spin off those properties to form new types that only the most successful programs get cotyped with?

And BTW, since I'm an only child, I reject the fact that Person has a "Siblings" property that I can never fill out. Why isn't it moved out to a more appropriate "People with Siblings" type? You see where I'm going with this. :)

(Off to find more discussions I missed last week, grrr...)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T23:07:29.0000Z

Er, yeah, that's what I meant!

Agreed, no workable model will have 100% of properties applicable to all instances. However, this one just seems really particular to a sub-group, not the whole.

Using the spouse/partner example, that property is immediately intuitive and has potential to be applicable to any instance. I don't think either of those traits apply to literary school/movement.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T22:09:47.0007Z

I don't think it's possible to create a workable model in which 100% of properties on a type would always be applicable to 100% of possible instances. I note, for example, think we're not having this conversation about the property "spouse (or domestic partner)" on the "person" type, even though that property is not applicable to people who have never been married. Is your argument that there are too many types of written works and authors for which the "literary movement" properties can't apply? (Scientific journal articles, textbooks, technical manuals, most reference books, most reviews, most newspaper reportage all spring to mind.)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T19:09:43.0000Z

I respectfully disagree. If a property does not apply to all instances of the type then I don't think it should belong on the type. A new type should be created that is co-typed with the first one and includes the additional properties. Otherwise, the sticking point you mention will result in unnecessary and aggregative errors. There should be no need to define "many".

A "Written work of literary movement" type that is co-typed with "Written work" and adds the literary movement property makes a lot more sense to me than forcing users to figure out whether or not their topic(s) meets the requirements to be attributed by any given property of an otherwise appropriate type. It's tough enough trying to figure out which type to use! :)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T17:46:07.0000Z

I moved this to "written work" and "author" from "poem" and "poet" because it was silly to constrain movements to poetic movements. And I was a bit hesitant to put them on written work and author because the types are so all-encompassing. But I do worry that creating "member of literary movement" and "work belonging to literary movement" types would be worse. It's pretty trivial to leave properties blank. It's rather more work to add a new type to get a property, since you have to know that you need to do so (although the publishing domain is chock full of these already, I admit).

Properties do not need to be applicable to all instances of a type to be on a type; they just need to be applicable to many of the topics (the definition of "many", of course, being the sticking point). And a significant number of poems, plays, fiction, essays, and certain types of prose non-fiction could be said to belong to a school or movement.