TV

TV Episode: Dubbers

2008-07-07T22:27:21.0013Z

Use the "special performance type" column in the "Performances" property on TV Episode. You should be able to select "Voice" for these types of performances.

TV Episode: Dubbers

2008-07-06T04:31:18.0013Z

How should I model a specific person who voices a specific other person in a specific TV episode? e.g. Kent Frick voicing Chairman Kaga in the Iron Chef blue crab battle?

TV: TV filming location

2008-07-02T18:39:23.0012Z

I think we should have a type, "TV filming location", for things like "Survivor: Vanuatu" which was filmed in Vanuatu. Thoughts?

TV: Suggested changes to TV character

2008-06-19T19:16:52.0012Z

tough one... my inclination would be to lead with the regular appearances, however, so it looks good to me.

TV: Suggested changes to TV character

2008-06-19T17:09:03.0012Z

Good idea. Take a look now. It looks to me like it's only defaulting to the first property, which is now "Programs in which character appeared as a regular" (or something like that). Is this the best property, or would "Episodes appeared in" be better? I mention this because only some characters will have data for the "Programs" property, while all characters could have data for Episodes.

TV: Suggested changes to TV character

2008-06-19T16:16:31.0012Z

What would you guys say to moving actor and series up ahead of year of 1st and final appearance? The filter page defaults to the first 3 properties and these make for much more interesting filter criteria.

TV Program: TV Program: add 'tagline'?

2008-05-17T01:14:21.0026Z

Seems a lot of tv programs from the past decade or so have taglines (similar to Film's longstanding taglines).

Examples I found from IMDb trolling:

Nip/Tuck:

The deeply superficial series returns.

Beauty is a curse on the world.

Make me beautiful.

Truth is only skin deep

A disturbingly perfect new drama.

Beauty isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Tell me what you don't like about yourself...?

Change what you can. Hide what you can't.

Six Feet Under:

Every Day Above Ground Is A Good One.

Life is wasted on the living.

How's Death?

Your whole life is leading up to this...

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

TV Actor: Voice Acting?

2008-04-16T20:43:39.0000Z

Voice actors are tv actors - in their tv performances, you can specify that they are the voice for a character.

There is a distinction between tv and film actor, but they are similar in the sense that for both the tv and film performance, you can specify a special performance type of voice.

TV Actor: Voice Acting?

2008-04-16T18:53:26.0012Z

Does TV Actor include voice acting for animated series? Or should there be a separate type for that? Voice Actor appears to be a separate profession from TV Actor. Also, should there be a distinction between voice acting for TV vs film?

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-14T19:56:47.0007Z

The next question is (having capitulated to adding seasons to the regular acting performance), do we still need the "to" and "from" dates? Arguably, no, since the seasons should tell us that. But sometimes we only have that data (e.g., from wikipedia infobox loades).

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-14T18:51:10.0007Z

Right, but if you use the Performance for a regular actor, the data gets quite dense very quickly. It seemed like Performances was for additional actors beyond the regulars. There’s also an important distinction; sometimes a frequent guest star becomes a regular character, and sometimes a regular character returns for a guest appearance.

In fact, here’s a crazy idea… What if the Regular Performance CVT had additional disambiguators for seasons and episodes?

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-14T18:22:07.0007Z

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, crism? TV episode has properties "performances" and "personal appearances" which are for all people who appear on the episode, regular, guest, or otherwise.

TV Season: Season credits?

2008-04-14T18:16:22.0007Z

Oddly enough, we used to do this, but people complained about the complexity! It would be easy enough to put back in though, if people want it.

TV Regular Performance: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-12T08:34:47.0012Z

I think it makes sense to have the regular performances property. However, there is no way to indicate in which episodes a regularly-credited actor appeared, and it is silly to mark them as a guest actor.

What if the regular appearance (and I have copied this comment from TV series) had an additional disambiguator pointing to the episodes in which the actor actually appeared?

TV Program: Regular performances, but which episodes?

2008-04-12T08:33:23.0012Z

What if the regular appearance (and I think I will copy this comment there) had an additional disambiguator pointing to the episodes in which the actor actually appeared?

TV Season: Season credits?

2008-04-12T07:48:59.0012Z

Currently, an actor can be a series regular or an episode actor, but there is no way to model season credits. Long-running shows, and even some shorter-lived ones, change their main cast each season, and it is interesting to model.

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2008-04-07T20:41:55.0007Z

Thanks -- that's a very interesting document. I like that they've modeled it as deeply as "episode versions". I doubt Freebase is likely to go that deep any time soon, but it's a useful concept in a lot of ways.

Superficially, it looks like the brand/series/episode model is very similar to our series/season/episode model, which is encouraging, and means that it should be fairly simple to create mappings between Freebase and applications using the Programmes Ontology.

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2008-04-03T21:59:15.0000Z

Only a year late... here's the BBC Programmes Ontology, built by Yves Raimond based on the BBC's internal data model:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/2008-02-28.shtml

You may also be interested in our programmes database, containing all programmes broadcast from about August 2007 onwards: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/

The idea is to release a machine-readable version of the /programmes site, marked up with the Programmes Ontology, some time soon.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2008-03-10T17:49:25.0007Z

Hi psych0fred,

This was also brought up in another discussion here. Hopefully with property borrowing, we can solve the problem you and duck1123 are describing.

TV episode performance: Bring back the Series display

2008-03-10T17:46:27.0007Z

I am in agreement with you - it is nice to know the episode/program information about a character that a tv actor played. However, entering the series information the type /tv/tv_guest_role would be a denormalizaton and would not link the series with the tv episode. It would require double data entry to populate the type /tv/tv_series_episode with the same information. A possible solution might be "property borrowing" - something that robert mentions in this discussion. This is something that we're trying to work on and hopefully we'll have support for it shortly.

TV episode performance: Bring back the Series display

2008-03-09T05:09:55.0012Z

With the new design of the site, it would be very helpful to have the series that the episode is associated with displayed on the actor's page.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2008-03-07T08:40:42.0000Z

I have a simple problem I can't figure out how to resolve. If an actor has a guest appearance on a TV show I can see it show up under the TV Actor schema but it doesn't correspond to the tv program/show that is also part of the schema. The example I am looking at is actor Tom Noonan who had a guest role in an episode of The X-Files called Paper Hearts. The episode title Paper Hearts shows up but it doesn't list what show it was from (unless you click on Paper Hearts). The way it's displayed in the scheme it appears that the TV show he starred in is also the TV show that he made a guest appearance on. Is it set up right? I figured you could see all of an actors appearances as part of their data set.

TV: Animated show?

2007-12-31T18:00:12.0007Z

The "other crew" property on "TV episode" is intended to be used for this sort of thing (i.e., any creative or production role that isn't addressed by any of the other properties).

TV: Animated show?

2007-12-29T20:35:52.0005Z

I don't know if this belongs in its own domain, belongs in Media Common, or if Animated shows are just part of TV, but it would be nice to be able to enter other roles, like "Animated by" to TV shows.. my favorite is the fact that No Doubt's original drummer, Eric Stefani, went on to be a Simpsons animator.... but there's no way to represent this in freebase right now. There are other examples of famous animators like Mel Blanc that would be nice to connect to their TV work. There are over 150 people designated as "Animators" according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animators

TV Season: Season Number

2007-12-13T00:20:43.0007Z

I added the property. Feel free to plug away at it!

TV Season: Season Number

2007-12-12T23:28:00.0000Z

That's not a bad idea. I think we had been thinking that this information could be caluculated based on the "from" and "to" dates on the season, but it's a lot easier to figure out the season numbers than it is the airdates of the first and last episodes.

TV Season: Season Number

2007-12-12T07:13:06.0012Z

TV Season should have a property expecting an integer describing what season this is for the show.

You can usually gather this from the title, (ex. "Fonzie's Shark-Jumping Variety Hour - Season Three") but this would give a way to find that information progmatically, as well as enabling the functionality that faye was looking for.

TV Season: Naming TV Seasons Type automatically

2007-09-29T05:29:57.0005Z

as first time user of freebase, i was very unclear as to how i create and name a season for a tv show.
after Faye (from the first post in this discussion) corrected me, i understood it was just a matter of me writing my own text (since then, some1 has added a short explanation of how to create a new season).

i think there should be a mechanism, to automatically create (at the user's request) a type which is consisted from the name of the top level type (or some other fixed text) and to which to add a variable text which the user choose.

this is great for TV seasons, as they are consisted from show name, then the word Season and a number. but maybe there are other Properties which can use this.
in any case, it will garrentee the same nameing scheme all over Freebase.
what do you think?
i will also add this, if some1 hasn't already, as a feature request.

TV: The Colbert Report

2007-07-25T22:10:36.0007Z

And I asked the question that should be answered every time a type is added -- are there properties unique to the type that a group of people would want to use? The answer seemed very clearly yes. This is one of the many reasons that the scope of domains is actually so small. Some of them may have dozens of types or even more.

TV: The Colbert Report

2007-07-24T18:59:12.0007Z

I don't really know that it will lead us anywhere we weren't already going -- this is an ability implicit in Freebase's design, and is one we already make use of in a number of schemas. I would actually encourage people to copy this model, because it enables us to model general types with properties that will be broadly applicable, while at the same time allowing users with particular interests to model and capture data that is very specific to a group of related topics.

TV: The Colbert Report

2007-07-24T05:06:32.0007Z

I love the Colbert report as much as the next guy - does it really deserve its own type? Does this mean we might have types for all our beloved shows? Can we add 'Twin Peaks Episode' with a number of pie sightings and references to 'hot, black coffee'? 'Lynch films Films exploring similar themes'? Don't get me wrong - this type is a lot of fun, just wondering what it might lead to.

TV: Schema renaming, additional properties

2007-07-23T01:03:46.0011Z

I made some changes to the TV episode schema. It should not break any code, but I have deprecated some properties.

TV: The Colbert Report

2007-07-23T01:02:15.0011Z

I just uploaded all episodes of the Colbert Report as of July 19, 2007. I also created a special co-type for Colbert Report episodes that stores "The Word" and the introductory quip for each show.

TV: Attaching to Television topic

2007-06-25T19:00:01.0011Z

how could i link the TV domain and/or the various TV types to the Television topic (and vice-versa)? i can imagine a world where somebody might not know what a Television is when they run into, say, the 'Magnum P.I.' topic. it would be nice to let them discover the Television topic from there. i kind of want it attached to all of the TV domain types too.

Media Platform?

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-07T18:01:49.0006Z

Cool - that would solve the problem.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-07T02:44:22.0006Z

We need property borrowing! That is, somebody will sensibly create a property on a type without knowing it should be shared by another type (like your IMDB TV/Film example). It is wrong to have on both, clearly, but it's also silly to put it on person, and really confusing and far too abstract put it on a new type called "actor".

Worse, this kind of refactoring would break the API once a schema is mature and being accessed by external applications.

With property borrowing (a currently unimplemented feature), If the TV actor type simply "borrowed" IMDB property in Film actor, then we would be able to keep the data model sane without having to read the future.

Interestingly, the Film IMDB property would be controlled by the film domain, so the TV domain would have no control over the name or other features of that property -- it would simply have to use it as-is and accept when the Film domain admins change the property.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-06T23:59:12.0006Z

This is a difficult question to answer in data modeling.

A while ago I asked a similar question regarding characters in different media that are represented as different types in Freebase: Book Character, TV Character, Theatre Character, Opera Character, Comic Strip Character, etc. Robert's reply to my post, although does not offer a solution to the emergence of a myriad of similar types across different media, does offer some explanation for why data is modeled this way in Freebase, and the advantages of that.

In the interest of sharing information, you can read my original post and Robert's reply here:
http://www.freebase.com/discuss/view?id=%2Ffictional_universe#%239202a8c04000641f8000000004ff9c64

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-06T22:57:35.0006Z

Re other media-specific entries - we already have computer game voice actor, and I suspect that will become Computer game actor to support video appearances as well. I could see Radio Actor as a possibility too.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-06T22:49:49.0006Z

looking at Film Actor, TV Actor, and Theater Actor, I see that the only information those types add to Person is about what roles that person has played in those respective mediums. how do we expect these to grow?

will there be more media-specific properties? will there be more media-independent actor-specific properties? I agree that creating an Actor property for one field doesn't make sense, but I wonder if there are other media-independent actor-specific properties that don't belong in Person.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-06T22:17:48.0006Z

This is both a good data modeling issue and a good UI question for Robert and James - what should we do when we have types with overlapping properties?

1. move the property to a more general type (IMDB page goes from film actor to actor, but this is disruptive to existing schema)
2. tell the UI how to handle this for special cases like Film and TV actor (doesn't disrupt schema, but incurs a lot of pain on the client side)

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-06T20:43:44.0006Z

If we do this, actors who are both film and TV (which will be a lot, maybe even most, of them) will have two "imdb link" properties, which will both be somewhat odd-looking and require developers to query both properties. The only alternative I can think of, however, would be to create a new type just to contain the property (named just "actor" or "IMDB entity" or something), which seems like overkill. Unless anybody else has a brilliant idea?

TV Program and TV episode could also have an imdb link property, now that I think about it. I'll wait to add these properties until we find out whether somebody has a brilliant idea, though.

TV Actor: IMDB link for TV actor?

2007-06-06T20:03:13.0011Z

Many TV actors have IMDB pages. Could we get a property for this, parallel to the property for Film actor ?

TV: Previous and Next Episodes

2007-05-29T06:11:30.0006Z

We have considered it, but we've not had a chance to actually implement it. Generally, we assume that 'higher functionality' like that would be the purview of an application developer that's focused on a particular subject area, in this case Television. The Freebase app is really the 80% solution, where dedicated developers can do something far more specific.

TV: Kevin Bacon as "Himself"

2007-05-23T02:56:40.0006Z

Sure! Rename the topic and it will be done.

TV: Kevin Bacon as "Himself"

2007-05-22T20:10:02.0006Z

Wouldn't this be better named as "his/herself" and aliased to "himself" and "herself"? You shouldn't have to run two queries to capture everybody playing themselves since you can always restrict the gender in your query manually.

TV: Previous and Next Episodes

2007-05-16T04:19:10.0006Z

I also would use it. I'm wondering though, could that not be generated automatically based on episode number? Have you (staff) considered adding the functionality for field that could be generated from a query?

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2007-05-14T21:28:47.0006Z

Your assumed hierarchy is correct. You're also right in your guess that the inconsistent naming is because we recently changed the schema, and obviously we missed a bunch of the labels.

I'd love to see how the BBC handles the modeling of this type of information; there's been some discussion about our model's failure to handle Doctor Who serials, and it would be good to see what else we're missing.

TV: Previous and Next Episodes

2007-05-14T16:26:12.0012Z

Hi, can we add "Previous Episode" and "Next Episode" properties to the TV series episode type? In addition to capturing the sequential data on TV episodes, that would also be a useful navigation tool for browsing.

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2007-05-13T01:24:17.0006Z

I find the varying usage of the words "Program", "Series" and "Season" a bit confusing -- it appears that in many cases the word Series is used to mean the same as TV Program (eg "TV Series Season" could be called "TV Program Season", right? unless I'm misunderstanding your usage. Plus "TV Series Episode" has links to both "Series" and "Season" but nothing to "Program").

Is that right? Perhaps the type called "TV Program" was until recently called "TV Series" and so the UI labels haven't been changed in related types?

Or I could just be confusing myself because we generally use "Series" and "Season" interchangeably here in the UK.

Right now I'm assuming the hierarchy is supposed to be:

TV Program (aka Series) -> TV Series Seasons -> TV Series Episode

is that right?

I know how hard it can be to model the varying relationships between episodes, programmes, series, strands, etc etc, if you want to see a few of our data models we use at the BBC, just ask.

You might regret it though ;-)

Brendan.

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-10T19:27:17.0006Z

Thanks for observing that some multi-part programs span multiple seasons, Jeff.

Instead of being a special case, a two-part episode bridging one season's finale and the next season's premiere was the normal with some of the Star Trek series (Voyager in particular). In terms of production and episode numbering though, they were considered two episodes, as were two-hour specials (like series finales) aired back-to-back. Nobody would say a typical season contains 25.5 episodes. That means a "multi-part TV episode", though singular from the perspective of a story, should be allowed to have multiple values for properties such as "episode number" and "production code".