Government

Government: Governments and Locations ?

2007-09-06T10:56:41.0000Z

Ok, I can see you wouldn't want to create separate topics for each government structure at most smaller levels. I'm not sure it's a problem at the national level because it's not that unusual to speak about the government of a nation independently of the nation itself. Governments come and go; not just the people who run them. But the country persists.

For the moment I think it makes sense to make smaller governments as types (e.g. PA Standard County Government or PA Home Rule County Government) and allow the topic for a particular US County to also be of the appropriate type government. That way it will pick up the correct set of properties, such as officials. I'll give it a try.

Thanks.

Government: Governments and Locations ?

2007-09-05T17:21:06.0007Z

Nope, you're not missing anything -- this is a known shortcoming with the government and location schemas that we haven't managed to address yet. Part of the issue is that we've imported the "Government of X" topics from Wikipedia (along with similar topics like "History of X", "Geography of X", etc.), which may or may not make sense to have as Freebase topics. We have the capability to store information for all levels of government, but I would hate to have to have a separate topic for the government of every city, county, state, oblast, region, province, etc.

In our current schema, it should be possible to add links for government officials to every sub-national administrative level (e.g., state, county, province, city, oblast, etc.) on a country-specific basis, although we have not done this yet. (We can do this because we have, or will have, types for every type of administrative division of every country, which will allow us to tailor the model to the specific political system of that division.) We can't do this as easily at the national level, as you've seen, which is definitely a problem.

Government: Governments and Locations ?

2007-09-05T14:12:08.0005Z

Hi,

I'm just getting started here and I have an interest in local governments so I've been browsing what's already been done in government in general.

Could anyone say why isn't there a property of "Government" that associates it with a "Location" (and vice versa)? I would think that the thing that makes a "Government" a special kind of organization is that it is associated with a location, in some privileged way. For example, as things stand now it looks like there is a topic for "Government/Government of Canada" and another topic for "Country/Canada" but there is no connection between them nor is there property on either type Government or type Country for connecting them.

I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

thanks,

Rich