Quotation Subject

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"

Golf: Championships

2008-08-19T15:47:42.0032Z

I added his Masters Tournament wins in here. As a result, he was typed as a sports team. Is there a better way to enter in individual sports championships?

United States: Removed "Official Language" and Liberty Dollar as form of Currency

2008-07-03T16:55:01.0005Z

Removed "Official Language" as per Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States

Removed "Liberty Dollar" as it is not a currency in itself, but rather a unit of currency.

United States: Liberty Dollar

2008-06-27T16:52:19.0005Z

I don't know that this can be rightfully linked as a form of currency inside the US as it is not recognized by the Federal government.

By the same token, the United States has no official language, although English is the predominant language.

Strategy: strategy as a game genre

2008-06-26T11:22:01.0005Z

The games links should possibly be split off to http://freebase.com/view/en/strategy_game

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-17T00:53:17.0007Z

I guess a "genres written" property on the Author type could be useful for some users but is maybe more appropriate on a less general author type. For example, do scholarly articles have a genre other than scholarly article? If not, why do all users entering data into the Author type need to consider "genres written" add possibly add redundant/inconsistent data? Similar to subject, it seems to me like this information would be best pulled from written work or a special case co-type of written work rather than the author.

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-16T23:50:49.0007Z

I think that regardless of whether there's a property on "author" for "genres" (I'm tending to agree that "subjects" is going to be less useful), people may still fill in "profession" with values like "spy fiction writer", and they should be allowed to do so (not that anybody could prevent them if they wanted to). So the question for me is not "should a 'genres' property on the Author type replace this use of the 'profession' property", which I think is what the original post suggests, but "is a 'genres' property on the Author type useful in and of itself?"

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-16T18:57:45.0007Z

IMO "Spy fiction writer" depends on the definition employed by the user. Why should that defintion be set by a schema, unless a particular user or group of users has a specific need? In that case, a spy_fiction_writer schema sounds appropriate to me.

I agree about the two properties: subject and genre. One is about content the other is about style.

"Subjects written about" should probably be pulled from the written works, not the writer.

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-16T18:41:14.0007Z

This sounds like two properties to me -- one for subject, and one for genre. I.e., John le Carre doesn't particularly write about spy fiction (he has, but only in short subjects) so much as he writes in the genre of spy fiction. Someone who's published books about, say, Cold War thrillers or the James Bond franchise, however, could be said to write about spy fiction. The question I have is: how valuable is this proposed property? It would be something of a denormalization of the genre/subject properties of the author's written works. I.e., there would be two ways to get a list of "spy fiction writers" -- from the proposed "genres" property on the Author type, and from the "genre" property on every work the author has written (and probably from the professions property as well, since somebody apparently thinks that's a useful way to describe this information as well). All of these would probably generate different results.

But then, I could see an argument that someone who's only written one spy novel, but a bunch of novels in other genres, wouldn't necessarily be considered a "spy fiction writer", any more than someone might consider Margaret Atwood to be a children's author, even though she's published at least one children's book.

Just throwing a bunch of thoughts out there, and seeing if anything sticks....

Writer: Types of writers

2008-06-15T06:30:46.0007Z

agree

Literature: Merge with the other "Literature" instance

2008-06-10T09:29:54.0012Z

Duplicate of Literature. Merge please.

Retirement: Not really a profession

2008-05-29T22:01:30.0005Z

Retirement isn't really a profession. The profession type should be used for the actual fields or occupations a person worked in during his or her working life.

Writer: Types of writers

2007-06-15T20:28:39.0011Z

Why have separate types for professions like "Spy fiction writer" and "Science writer" (which have no interesting properties anyway). Wouldn't a "Subjects written about" property be better?

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)