typelibrarian

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-09-03T17:28:53.0012Z

I'm assuming that this membership grade would also handle the officers of an organization, e.g, AAAI, IEEE. These folks usually have other full time jobs, so listing a guy like this with these orgs as employers just to have his title entered doesn't seem right. Or perhaps, we should add another property called title to /organization/organization_member?

John A White serves as the Vice President of Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award Foundation.

He also served as the President of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers.

Field Of Study: 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.

Field Of Study: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T00:09:20.0005Z

Just posting this to crosspost this disscussion.

Field Of Study: 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"

Chemical Compound: Curation and more identifieres? ChemSpider, KEGG, etc.

2008-08-13T16:50:01.0012Z

Hi and welcome to freebase!

Thanks for the info about ChemSpider and KEGG. We'll check with those sites about licensing, and if it's compatible with ours, we'll look at loading the data.

Chemical Compound: Curation and more identifieres? ChemSpider, KEGG, etc.

2008-08-13T10:40:02.0006Z

Should we not add more identifiers like the ChemSpider ID, KEGG ID, and some more?

Especially, to combine Wikipedia curation efforts.

Chemical Compound: Dataload from e.g. the Chemical Abstracts Society?

2008-08-13T10:31:55.0000Z

Please note that CAS agreed helping Wikipedia, and please check also the discussion on the ChemSpider blog and the WikiProject/CASvalidation.

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-07-08T23:49:00.0000Z

I've done this, but without separating the fictional topics from the real-world topics: http://www.freebase.com/tools/schema/fictional_universe/school_in_fiction.

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-07-01T05:36:32.0000Z

I would prefer that the fictional topic be seperate from the real-world topic. i.e. University of Cambridge in the James Bond Universe be a seperate topic from the real University of Cambridge.
Perhaps 'educational institution in fiction' could have a 'based upon' property to link the fictional and real-world topics?

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-06-30T19:42:21.0012Z

An "educational institution in fiction" type could work -- we've used that locution a few times for types that can have both fictional and real-world instances.

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-06-28T13:47:06.0005Z

Could we have some way of linking in the educational background of a character? i.e. an education property.

My first thought was that we would need a 'Fictional Educational Institution' type, but that would not cover characters who were educated at real world institutions. e.g. James Bond at the University of Cambridge.

I think we therefore need an 'educational institution for fictional characters' type for the property.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-25T01:11:05.0001Z

Well ok then.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T22:57:06.0005Z

Ed asks, “Aren’t board members always members?” Not at all. It is common, especially with non-profits, to ask outsiders to sit on a board to assure some independent perspective.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T22:18:38.0012Z

I also agree that this would be useful. I thought I made a similar suggestion a couple months ago but could not find it. Part of this suggestion was that "Board members" and other structured classes of membership should be co-typed as "Member". For example, Organization_board_member is linked as a property of Organization but is not linked to "Member" in any way. Aren't board members always members?

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T21:28:10.0000Z

Seems like a reasonable property to me.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T20:27:32.0012Z

I think there is. Since membership is a mediated property, the "grade" of membership would hang off the "organization membership" type. There could be a "class" property that links to an instance of a "membership class" instance, for which we would have to create this new type. Comments?

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-23T12:56:47.0012Z

A large number of organizations have varying grade of memberships and associations available for it's members. For an example see Institute of Structural Engineers.

This matters greatly in the type of organisation where the difference between being a Chartered member or not has legal implications in the work of the member.

Is there a way to incorporate this into the schema?

Play: I think plays should have something like 'Subjects'

2008-05-15T19:15:15.0007Z

The type "Written Work" has a property "Subjects", so I'd suggest that "Written Work" be added as an Included Type of "Play". I'm surprised it isn't already.

Play: I think plays should have something like 'Subjects'

2008-05-15T19:14:12.0000Z

Plays should probably be co-typed as written works to get the subject property. Actually, I had originally intended to refactor them into written work when we refactored the publishing domain, but I seem to have omitted it.

Play: I think plays should have something like 'Subjects'

2008-05-15T18:57:07.0012Z

An example is "Alma" which is based on a famous Austrian woman Alma Mahler-Werfel and would could have as a subjects:

Biography, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Sanitorium ?

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-07T01:53:05.0007Z

Neil Patrick Harris plays himself in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. We could model that as him playing a fictional character named Neil Patrick Harris, who is in turn based on the actor… but “As Himself” is a well-established convention.

On the other hand, when Neil Patrick Harris is on The Tonight Show, he is making a personal appearance, not playing himself.

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-07T00:18:56.0007Z

I wonder if these roles can't just be part of film performance, already it has Himself/Herself (which I am not sure if there is a good distinction between itself and the default Personal Appearance role type).

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-06T23:37:20.0007Z

That is weird. I can't remember our rationale, except that it probably involved the thought that "film appearances" is either too rare a property to put on "person" or would be too confusing, and that we hadn't thought of a good co-type. The personal TV appearance type probably has a similar problem. Suggestions for resolving this would be welcome.

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-06T23:17:22.0005Z

As currently designed, a Personal Film appearence doesn't appear on the person topic and only appears on the film topic (Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth is a classic example, the only film appearance currently is for a Futurama show).

I've even at times forgotten its there when entering data (THX-1138 documentary springs to mind as a recent example I need to now correct all the acting performances to personal appearances).

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2008-04-29T23:55:30.0000Z

Well there is somthing like that by user duck1123

Should it be a topic-based property or simply a text-based propert (there are some topics existing for some of the more well-known alter-IDs).

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2008-04-29T23:19:45.0007Z

How about an alter-ego property? This would come in handy for superheroes. Seems that this is being stuck on as an alias right now, but there are enough superheroes that it might as well be a property, right?

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T17:52:50.0000Z

Not sure what advice you want; just post it again wherever you initially meant to. (Perhaps on the Dissertation topic, which is actually called Thesis?) BTW, you can add links to posts; no need to just list the URL in text.

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T15:53:43.0007Z

But I posted that in the wrong place! Please advise, thanks, jf

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T15:52:37.0012Z

There's life after your dissertation, even if that's hard to believe. Writing's as much manual labor as mental, as much about rituals of time and space and resonance as about methods, and about knowing that our fingers can lead our minds to new places, fresh ideas and implications. But dissertations are often hell, a kind of writing you'll never do again: they're lonelier experiences, riskier, longer and slower pushes uphill than most other writing you'll ever do. At least that's some of what's in the essay, "Notes on Academic Writing," that I wrote years ago to avoid writing a conference paper—and I've found that this essay has had an underground existence ever since, being passed along from one dissertation writer to another delighted to see that someone else was as miserable as they were and went on, nevertheless, to publish a good deal of material and not perish after all. That essay can be found at: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/jff1/learningacadwrtg.htm

Still, I do wish someone had shown me John Trimble's wonderful Writing with Style!

Theater Character: Add Fictional Character as an included type

2008-04-24T23:13:38.0007Z

That would seem to make sense, yes. Consider it done.

Theater Character: Add Fictional Character as an included type

2008-04-24T18:56:20.0005Z

Shouldn't Fictional Character be an included type of Theater Character?

Chemical Compound: Dataload from e.g. the Chemical Abstracts Society?

2008-03-16T11:05:50.0000Z

Fair enough - forgot to check their terms of service :/

Chemical Compound: Dataload from e.g. the Chemical Abstracts Society?

2008-03-14T13:26:34.0000Z

CAS is protected under copyright, and their terms of service clearly forbid this.

http://www.cas.org/legal/infopolicy.html#unauthorized

However, there are free alternatives, such a ZINC (Soichet lab, UCSF), that may be permissible for upload.

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T22:06:35.0007Z

(Sorry, meant to link to the other thread on historical persons.)

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T22:05:30.0007Z

In this thread, they even have the same problem for real historical persons: "Take "Person": where their dates of birth and death are not known, the dates in which a person flourished is standardly used to disambiguate them." They want to specify the birth date as "Qing Dynasty". This will probably be solved by splitting out a separate type (like Living Thing) that defines Birth Date and which the Person type includes. (Then you could mix in a different type that defines the different kind of birth date that you need.) The relevance to "contextual assertions" still applies. If you have a type for real Living Thing (with a birth date), will a user be afraid to use it on a fictional character? Right now, they should be afaid because it implies the character is real like all the other topics with the property. But the problem is solved if the character uses the same type as real things, but asserts the birth date in the context of the fictional universe (so it doesn't come up ono searches for "real people born on this date").

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T21:39:13.0007Z

I don't think this example would actually be solved by assertions, since regardless of whether we implement assertions or not, we still need a type to hold the data, and we currently lack a type that could be used for both real dates and dates in fictional calendar systems. It does seem like people want to enter this data for fictional characters, so it's worth trying to model a type we can use. A compound-value type with two properties might suffice -- one of type "datetime" for fictional characters in universes using the Gregorian calendar (AND who are born within the range 10,000 BCE - AD 9999), and one or two for all others. I have a bazillion things on my plate right now, but if I have time, I'll play around with it.

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T20:10:11.0000Z

This came up on a couple Fictional Character topics where someone wanted to give a birth date so they had to make the character a Person too, which is a no-no. To beat the same drum again: This problem is solved by allowing users to use the existing types for Person, Education, Politician, Author, etc. etc. on a fictional character - just put the assertion for the bithdate or "term of office as president" in the context of the fictional universe. In everyday life, people put properties, not only on topics, but on assertions. Quotation: "President Bush says there are WMDs but the French prime minister says there are not". Citation: "According to the US Census, the population is 100,000". Fictional assertions about real things "In the universe the 'Independence Day' movie, the Empire State Building is destroyed on July 2, 1996". (Wouldn't it be great to put this assertion on the real Empire State Building topic without having to create a separate type for 'Fictional Building' when we have to make a separate topic?)

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T18:50:51.0007Z

The problem here is that lots of fictional characters exist in universes that don't use the Gregorian calendar, so we'd need to find a way to capture Gregorian dates, Stardates, Middle-Earth dates, years A.F. (After Ford), etc.

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T04:47:17.0004Z

Can you add a Date of Birth property (and maybe Date of Death too)?

Chemical Compound: Dataload from e.g. the Chemical Abstracts Society?

2007-07-31T01:25:42.0004Z

Could we load in data from e.g. the Chemical Abstracts Society
http://www.cas.org/
?

Field Of Study: 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)