skud

Suggest future data mobs: Saved views

2008-10-03T16:47:45.0012Z

Thanks Faye!

Suggest future data mobs: Saved views

2008-10-03T09:38:26.0017Z

Gladly sharing a few simple "saved views" I created out of curiosity:

1) Authors who committed suicide (142 so far, yikes!)

Filtered from type Author and Person type's property "Cause of Death"

2) Artworks depicting "Madonna and Child" (historically an extremely popular subject)

Utilized the often overlooked "Art Subject" property of type Artwork.

3) Olympic athletes who attended UC Berkeley (27 so far but I'm sure there are more)

Simply filtered from Person's "Education Institution" property on type Olympic Athlete. Voila!

Aubreyiad: Seeking OCD types to take on a book each

2008-09-20T19:24:30.0017Z

I'm working through Master and Commander, page by page, and cataloguing characters, ships, places, dishes, and species mentioned. I'd love to find other people prepared to take on a book each. Any takers?

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-20T04:35:22.0012Z

I'm mostly talking about "where can i find this on a map". The historical data isn't really important to me but I imagine it would be valuable to other users. I agree that we should probably just go with duplicate data for now at least until someone with more involved use cases comes along.

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-16T21:53:37.0012Z

When you say "information about the physical building", are you talking about "where can I find this on a map" sort of information, or "how old is the building" type of information? If the former, are you interested in historic data as well? Because if not, a simple "current address" should suffice. If the former, but you do need historic info, that would get trickier because the client can't currently handle CVTs that link to other CVTs (i.e., a CVT that had From and To dates plus linked to Mailing Address). If, however, you're interested in the "how old is the building" sort of info, we need to look at something else.

Re enumerating Governmnet Office or Title, the model really does expect the jurisdiction to be part of the title, so enumerating that wouldn't work so well. I'm becoming more inclined to allow for the minor denormalization of entering the ambassadorship twice.

skud: Test discussion, please ignore

2008-09-16T17:40:32.0017Z

What sort of links do we get embedded in discussions?

Existing topic

skud: Complex tables

2008-09-16T16:23:59.0012Z

Architectural consultant is what we call a Compound Value Type (CVT). These are notoriously difficult to delete since they don't have topics of their own and it's hard to just go to the page and flag them for delete. The best you can do is remove the links to them from outside (eg. in Architecture Firm and Company). I believe there was talk about creating a bot to go round cleaning up unlinked CVTs automatically, but I'm not sure what came of it. Perhaps someone like cheunger or crism knows; they should see this, I hope, and pipe up ;)

skud: Complex tables

2008-09-16T14:57:53.0005Z

I am having some trouble with copmplex tables. I have created one called Architectural consultant. It has five entries, but I am trying to remove two of them. However, it seems I have to remove them from the table that references the complex table, and since two of those tables are "Architecture firm", and "Company", I am unable to edit them. Can these entries be deleted from the "Architectural consultant" table?

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-15T01:13:12.0012Z

What if the job title property in Government Position Held was changed to an enumeration to prevent users from adding ambassador's tenures as a position held? I think we could reasonable enumerate all posible political job titles as long as they don't include the jurisdiction in the title (ie. President of Iran).

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-15T01:07:01.0012Z

For me, the main purpose of modeling embassies is to capture the information about the physical building itself. If the phyical location of the embassy changes over time I guess we could make the street address a dated CVT.

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-10T16:50:13.0012Z

One more thought about a slightly different area: Embassy has properties for the To and From counties, Ambassadors, and Address. Are we trying to model the institution of the embassy, or the physical location of the embassy? If we're only interested in contemporary data, location might be OK. But once we start typing Benjamin Franklin as an ambassador, there's no really good way to indicate that he was the United States' ambassador to Sweden and France, since it might be hard to determine what (physical) embassy he was attached to. Should we just change the property to "current address", and say that we're modeling the institution?

Along these lines, it would be nice to split topics like Embassy of Angola in Ottawa, which conflate the embassy with the building it currently resides in ("Panet House"). This is obviously a carry-over from Wikipedia, but it would be good to decide how we want to do this at the outset.

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-10T16:33:23.0012Z

I think Kirrily is modeling the fact that ambassadors can be ambassador to multiple countries simultaneously, not that they can represent multiple countries.

I'd rather go with the documentation solution than try to split Politician into n number of types, and accept that, in some cases, the ambassadorship will be duplicated, particularly in cases where people are interested in the appointers.

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-10T00:03:17.0013Z

Just FYI... Something else to note is that one person can simultaneously be an ambassador to many places. I forget where I saw this, but I think that eg. New Zealand only has a couple of ambassadors to African countries; there's one based in maybe Kenya who is the ambassador to most of East Africa, and another based in maybe Ghana who is ambassador to most of West Africa. So that's why I separated "attached to embassy" and "to country".

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-10T00:00:29.0012Z

Jeff, I think Kirrily is modeling the fact that an ambassador can represent more than one country concurrently during their tenure. I'm not sure how often this occurs but it is possible.

The simplest option that I see is that we could just write a help topic that explains to new users that the Ambassador type stores ambassador's assignments and that the Politician type stores all the other positions held.

A more aggressive choice would be to move the Government Position Held CVT out of the Politician type and into more specific types for Ambassador, Senator, Congress Member, Head of State etc.

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-09T22:23:04.0012Z

Funny, I had just emailed skud about that very question. The only real denormalizations are the date values. I'm leaning toward the idea that ambassadors could be both Politicians and Ambassadors, and have the appointment info in one property, and the country info in another. (Although the country info is slightly denormalized in the name of Government Office or Title topic (US Ambassador to France, Russian Ambassador to New Guinea, etc.)) But I'm not entirely sure yet.

Embassies and consulates: Initial Impressions

2008-09-09T21:36:42.0018Z

I just took the new Embassy type for a spin and it looks really good. I had been thinking about adding a CVT for ambassadors tenures to my old type but I never got around to it. The only small issue that I can see is that it might overlap with the Government Position Held CVT in the Politician type but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

skud: Wikimeet Sept 2008

2008-09-08T21:40:33.0012Z

Thanks! It was great meeting you. Let me know if you'd like a hand setting up your Machine Dance domain. Have you seen our existing Musical Game type?

skud: Wikimeet Sept 2008

2008-09-07T05:00:59.0017Z

Thanks for hosting it. Your project has promise and great potential.

Olympic Games: athletes by country: Beware of Long Lists!

2008-08-29T06:36:47.0012Z

No worries. As a programmer, I probably should have realized the limitation of what I was trying to do and in the end it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.

Olympic Games: athletes by country: Beware of Long Lists!

2008-08-29T04:40:52.0012Z

Yeah, the import tool can be a bit of a pig on long lists. I usually try to do it in batches, myself. Sorry it caused you trouble :(

Olympics are go!: Event

2008-08-19T00:34:06.0012Z

Bearing in mind that "event" can mean two different things here (the type "Event" and the type "Olympic event", this is how I think it should work. The sport is "Rowing", the Olympic event is "Men's single sculls" and the competition is "Rowing at the X Olympics - Men's single sculls". (Now I am not personally very fond of the naming convention Wikipedia uses for what we're calling competitions, but that's a side issue.)

Some users have been typing the topics such as "Rowing at the 2008 Olympics" as type Event, and linking them to the Olympic games and Competitions using the includes/included by properties. I don't really think these topics are necessary, but I know other people like them; note that they are currently extraneous to the Olympic domain (i.e., there is no type for them).

Olympics are go!: Event

2008-08-18T23:55:01.0017Z

On a separate topic, I was wondering if we're correctly aligning the competition with the event.

Let's take Rowing. We have "Rowing at the 2008 Summer Olympics" topic, then the individual competition topics, like "Rowing at the 2008 Summer Olympics - Men's Single Sculls". So in the Men's Single Sculls topic, we have "Rowing at the 2008 Summer Olympics" as the value in the Event Type/Included in Event.

But is "Rowing at the 2008 Summer Olympics" really the event? If you're in the Event Type, how do you find all the 2008 Summer Olympics competitions if they're all broken out?

And do we even want all these competitions in the wiki format? We have thsi nice olympics competitions type where we can have medals for multiple olympics, but using this wiki format we never would.

I would think we'd say the event is "Rowing", the competition is "Men's Singles Sculls", and then we'd associate the Olympics year in the event and competition types.

Olympics are go!: Cleanup

2008-08-18T23:45:56.0010Z

I think there may need to be a cleanup/scrub effort when all is done. Here are some thoughts I've had while adding medalists:

I noticed some folks don't get using the "+" to add multiple people to a single gold (so instead they have 4 separate golds, one for each member of the team).
I know when I was adding a bunch of events to a single sport, I began to worry if I had mistakenly mixed things up. I've been looking at the medals by event page on the official site, and for those like judo and wrestling where there are a ton it is easy to glance at the wrong bracket. We may want to do a "sanity check" to make sure all the medals are actually correct?
There are a ton of duplicate topics for athletes. First, I think a bot or mass upload created a lot of duplicates, but I think it is easy to create new ones on the fly when the name the Olympics has is different than the name that already exists (for example, we have the name with a local language character, or we have a shorter name).
There are also probably topics that are mis-aligned because the person's name is common. I found one today where the olympics were associated with the totally wrong person. Chances are that won't be the only one.

I'm not sure what, if anything, we might want to do. But I thought I'd mention it.

MQL example: read vs. write

2008-08-18T12:47:33.0034Z

Err, no strong opinion. Sorry, I should've marked this domain as draft. I was really just messing around with it, and it was quite a while ago now.

MQL example: read vs. write

2008-08-17T19:06:56.0018Z

Do you think it is necessary or useful to have a property describing if the MQL example is of a read or write query? Or is the description field good enough for this kind of information?

Olympic Games: athletes by country: Beware of Long Lists!

2008-08-09T17:37:58.0000Z

Hmm, it seems like even though the import tool timed out, a lot of my topics were actually added. I still need to reconcile the whole list to find out which ones are missing though.

Olympic Games: athletes by country: Beware of Long Lists!

2008-08-09T01:08:09.0017Z

I just reconciled a list of 332 olympic athletes only to have the list import tool time out and loose all my work. If I can bring myself to do it all over again, I'll make sure to import it in batches of 100 but I thought I'd mention it because I wouldn't want anyone else to go through this.

skud: St. Louis

2008-07-30T20:06:54.0012Z

Awesome. Thanks again, guys.

skud: St. Louis

2008-07-30T19:33:01.0012Z

Thanks joguinn; looks like crism was in a more fortuitous timezone so I'm glad he caught this. FYI, some of us keep an eye on all the discussion threads everywhere on Freebase, so you could probably post a note just about anywhere and have someone pay attention ;)

skud: St. Louis

2008-07-30T18:10:57.0006Z

BTW, nothing was deleted; it’s just that the type view doesn’t show any information not related to types, as types are not expected to be anything else (like cities).

skud: St. Louis

2008-07-30T18:10:15.0001Z

Sorted. Thanks for catching that. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen…

skud: St. Louis

2008-07-30T17:15:03.0017Z

Hi:

You're the only person I've really had an interaction with, so I figured I'd bring this up to you. St. Louis, MO has apparently been deleted or set as a type. Is there any way to get it back to a topic? There was a ton of info in there that may have been deleted.

Jameson

skud: A little bit of insight

2008-07-18T00:23:28.0007Z

Thanks Brian, I've emailed you!

skud: A little bit of insight

2008-07-17T19:00:22.0012Z

Just wanted to drop you a line as I've joined the Religion domain, and I am interested in the work that you are doing at Freebase. I run an online community called Ecunet.org that serves mostly the Christian faith, and I think we might explore how we could work with this environment.

If you get a chance, drop me a line - brian.lang@ecunet.org

Thanks!

skud: 'Convention' type

2008-07-14T01:00:56.0012Z

Can we please add "Convention" as a property of Convention Organizer?

Conventions: properties...

2008-07-10T02:03:06.0005Z

Can we please add "Convention" as a property of convention organizer?

skud: congrats on the new job!

2008-07-10T00:27:31.0012Z

Wow, I feel privileged to be featured. I've added a pic to my profile.

skud: IM

2008-07-04T16:20:17.0012Z

Hi,

Tried to reply to your on Twitter but the DM feature seems to be down.

I'm on XMPP/Google Talk on frankie@frankieroberto.com

Frankie

Least Developed Countries: How to associate?

2008-07-03T20:35:16.0000Z

Great, thanks. I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something :)

Least Developed Countries: How to associate?

2008-07-03T20:02:15.0000Z

You can't really associate them directly, but go to the relevant topic, type it as a "hospital" or "building" or whatever, and usually there's a field for "address". Put as much of the address detail as you can in there -- the country, at minimum -- and that will help. You could also co-type as "location" and use the contains/contained-by relationship, if you liked.

(Note that if you give a nice, fully-qualified address, our geobot will probably come along and do the location co-typing for you, and figure out the latitude and longitude for the geolocation, too.)

Least Developed Countries: How to associate?

2008-07-03T18:47:37.0037Z

How do you associate buildings/structures, hospitals, etc with a country? You don't add that type to the country's entry, right? Otherwise it is as if the country itself is a hospital, structure, etc.

So do you go to those individual types and add them in there? But then how can you look at Nepal and see all the various associations? Or is that a custom search or something?

Thanks.

Tall ships: Tall Ship school

2008-07-02T18:45:23.0012Z

Which neighbour? Obviously I need to know ALL ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW.

Tall ships: Tall Ship school

2008-07-02T02:05:01.0044Z

One of our neighbors was raising money for "Tall ship school" for San Francisco girls. Anybody know about this?

skud: Namesake/source Domain

2008-06-24T13:36:47.0012Z

Alan,

There's nothing inherently permanent about user types not marked as draft; the owner/admin may delete them if s/he wishes. However, this tends not to happen when those types are actually being used.

If/when we promote a type to the commons, the data moves along with it. The "Influence" domain is one example of this. At Freebase HQ there is a team called Data Architecture who are responsible for domain promotions, and they make sure this happens smoothly.

skud: Namesake/source Domain

2008-06-24T05:04:59.0012Z

In general how permanent are your user-types that are not marked as draft? And should a user-type be adopted as a official type in the future, the data that has been entered is safe I hope?

skud: Namesake/source Domain

2008-06-21T23:21:34.0012Z

Yes ;) Robert was telling me I should do it as a DM and I was saying "But I only started the motorcycle one yesterday!" so I thought instead I'd just post about a handful of interesting new domains and hope that some people would get into it. Glad you like it :)

skud: Namesake/source Domain

2008-06-21T15:44:18.0012Z

Thanks for creating the new namesource and namesake types! I've been thinking about doing these for a while. You know that you've just created another data mob, right?

skud: congrats on the new job!

2008-04-01T14:16:29.0005Z

Good to see an old compatriot doing well!

I'm going to be in SF for a few months late this year. It would be good to catch up for a beverage to see what you've been up to...