Company

Company: Shareholders are not necessarily Person

2008-07-02T18:08:54.0012Z

Yeah, I think that makes sense. I had made it person originally cause I was pulling out the individual's SEC filings. In addition to companies, funds and endowments can be shareholders.

Company: Shareholders are not necessarily Person

2008-06-30T12:36:21.0005Z

Another company can also be a major shareholder.

Could the type of 'Major Shareholder' be changed to a type of 'Shareholder', rather than 'Person'?

Company: Companies versus Divisions

2008-06-03T22:11:07.0007Z

I agree with you, there needs to be a company_division type, with a parent company.

Company: Companies versus Divisions

2008-05-31T17:56:36.0014Z

I'm new here, so excuse me if I'm being ignorant.

I would like a distinction between companies and divisions of companies. For instance, if I search for "Boeing", I get " Boeing Integrated Defense Systems" and " Boeing Commercial Airplanes" in addition to the actualy company itself. Well, these aren't subsidiaries, they're just divisions of the same company. They are not seperate legal entities. It seems to me that these should be classified as "divisions of companies", not "companies" themselves. Another example (among many others) is Lockheed Martin.

Is there a way to query strictly for just the actual companies that I'm not aware of?
That is really what I'm after.

Thanks,

acm

Company: Add CEO property

2008-05-28T17:51:43.0007Z

The problem I think, isn't from the company side, but rather from the person side. The employment history property was intended to read like a resume. This should include tenures as CEO or any other executive-level employment.

We could choose to denormalize and add an "Executive managers" or "Senior managers" property to the company type, but there would have to be some kind of autonomous process ensuring that this denormalization is maintained in both properties.

At some point, we may have "synthetic" properties that would allow these properties to be created from a query. That is, the "executive managers" property would be a query that would show employees of that company with a preset collection of job titles. Such synthetic properties would be a way of pushing common patterns up into freebase so it doesn't have to be maintained in client code.

For now, however, I think we should keep the structure as-is.

Company: Add CEO property

2008-05-27T21:38:08.0007Z

Does it really make sense to duplicate the information?

Also, a couple of other points

- Not every company has a CEO. Some have several CEOs of different divisions, etc.

- CFO is also a very important position, given that they have to sign off on SEC statements.

- "Employees" is part of the "Employer" type, not "Company". Which schema would apply to upper management?

Maybe this is more of a UI issue? I can't look at the page and filter to just the position I'm interested in.

The only other thing I can think of is to separate "management" from "employees" for companies, or something like that.

Company: Add CEO property

2008-05-27T21:31:56.0007Z

This is an interesting idea; we have done similar things elsewhere (in some of the sports, teams have both current and historical rosters, for example). My main question about it is what the expected type would be. "Employees" links to the Person type, through the property "Employment history". But very few people (comparatively) have been heads of companies, so we would either need a "head of company" type or a "companies headed" property on Person. (We would hopefully find better names for the type and property if we did this.)

Company: Add CEO property

2008-05-23T20:11:38.0005Z

The head of a company can get lost in among the board members or employees, but seems siginificant enough to warrant its own property.

Company: Add "Offering" (products, services, ...)

2008-03-09T13:54:47.0005Z

Every company offers products / services, commonly known in marketingspeak as the offering of a company.

Company: Dated money values

2008-01-22T16:20:07.0007Z

Yep, revenue, operating income and net income should be dated money values and that's coming up in the next round of schema changes!

Company: Dated money values

2008-01-22T06:42:02.0005Z

Shouldn't Revenue and Operating income be "Dated money values" instead of "Money values" because these values are summarized by fiscal quarter?

Company: Ownership

2008-01-06T01:44:47.0007Z

I agree that "owner" may be a better root property. It could just exist as a higher order type that is subset into the various markets. There are properties of owners that are universal. For example, they could have a property of "Venture funded companies" with a CVT that lists % ownership and date. Groupings at this level could be very useful for tracking trends in business strategies.

Company: Ownership

2008-01-05T23:00:22.0007Z

Part of the issue is that when you're looking at media ownership, it really does help to see that News Corp owns Fox AND the New York Post AND satellites AND sports teams etc at the same time -- that gives you a sense of whether they have monopolies in particular markets, vertical monopolies over content, etc. And a person might well want to look at all properties in which News Corp has an over 50% interest, for example. But maybe it would be just as easy to add "percent ownership" to "television channels owned" and to "websites owned" and then do a search for ">50% percent ownership in t.c.owned AND >50% percent ownership in w.s.owned"?

If someone wants to see just the TV channels, mightn't it be better to let them narrow "owner" down only to results which are of type "TV channel"?

I think what I am trying to address is that the relationship "owner" does have properties of its own, and some of them may be near-universal -- you can own 50% of a house, 50% of a joint venture, 50% of a piece of land, 50% of rights to a copyrighted work?... Now I'm finding myself wondering what a lawyer would say about this...

Company: Ownership

2008-01-05T21:45:20.0000Z

Hrm, I've got partial answers for both of your points.

1) One reason we have those types like that, rather than a general "owner of stuff" type, is for the reverse properties. "Television channel owner" will have a reverse property of "television channels owned", which is more useful -- for most everyday purposes -- than one that says "stuff owned" if you know what I mean. Though I agree it does make it hard to see who owns eg. television channels *and* aircraft *and* rare stamps.

2) There's a type for "venture funded company" for what it's worth, which provides properties for eg. rounds of investment, who's invested, etc. Metaweb itself is typed as this if you want to take a look.

Perhaps a useful thing at this point would be for you to think about a use case for what you're trying to do, rather than thinking in the abstract. What eventual applications do you foresee for this ownership data, and what sort of information do you hope to extract and in what form?

Company: Ownership

2008-01-05T20:54:39.0012Z

(I'm posting this here rather than under various "x owned" type discussions because it strikes me as an issue that impacts the "company" type across industries and across entities owned...)

I'm interested in media ownership, and I've been scanning the various types in this domain and wondering if they should maybe be done a slightly different way. Two possible issues:

1) Should "website owner," "television channel owner," "venture investors," etc really be different types, or is there some way to abstract "ownership" into a single type which might be useful across categories -- at the very least, across the range of company ownership? I saw sort of a similar discussion over in architecture which makes me wonder how broadly this abstraction could be expanded.

2) How can we represent the nature of ownership better? When I was working for nonprofits which were attempting to document media ownership for anti-monopoly purposes, we wanted information on how much of a stake a company had in a particular venture; we kept track of percentages. The difference between venture investment and ownership already does some work towards documenting different types of investment. I'm wondering, though, if better nuance could be captured if there was a property of "ownership" types which said "this is a venture" or "this is a wholly-owned subsidiary" rather than making those types in and of themselves.

Company: Suggested properties for Company of State/Provincial and Federal Incorporation Numbers

2007-11-10T22:21:50.0007Z

I believe the Corporation number is the significant, unique number. The BN number does not appear to be referenced in the online help, so I have no idea what it refers to.

Company: Company should have (new) Sector type

2007-10-22T22:04:00.0007Z

Jonathan, check out the discussion on the Industry type. Would the NACE, NAICS, and SIC categorizations do what you want?

Remember that we don’t necessarily need the industry and sector to be explicit, if we can imply the industry from the sector.

Company: Financial metrics should be tied to a time period

2007-10-22T17:49:42.0007Z

There actually is a date property on the monetary value for these properties, but unfortunately, you have to view the topic page for the value itself to add it. I.e., if you mouse-over the value in the property list, click the little arrow that appears, and select "view" from the menu. But this is less than ideal. I'll open a bug to change the expected type to one where the date is more easily visible. (This will require data migration, so it may take some time to implement this.)

Company: Financial metrics should be tied to a time period

2007-10-20T17:18:39.0007Z

I agree. Moreover, not only does making fields such as incomes and revenues a Dated Currency (a type that does not currently exist) make such numbers meaningful, but it makes possible queries that compute period-to-period growth in those figures. So someone could query all companies with large growth in profit (though profit isn't yet a property of a company!) over the last two years.

Company: Company should have (new) Sector type

2007-10-20T17:05:59.0012Z

Currently Companies have only an Industry. I propose the creation of a new Sector type, and modification of the Company type to have both Industry and Sector types. Having both allows finer granularity in classification (e.g. the financial services sector has asset management and investment banking as two industries). This is moreover the way companies tend to be classified outside of Freebase.

That example, by the way, calls attention to the fact that there is a one-to-many mapping between sector and industry, so in fact the Sector type should itself aggregate Industry types. In that case, then, perhaps Company should just have an Industry type, with the Sector linked to the Industry type automatically via the latter's membership in the former? The issue here would be data integrity: if a Company has a Sector, then the Company shouldn't be able to have an Industry that does not belong to its Sector. I don't know how this issue is best dealt with in Freebase.

Company: Suggested properties for Company of State/Provincial and Federal Incorporation Numbers

2007-10-16T02:03:52.0007Z

There seems to be two numbers in use on that site, as in Corporation #4340159 BN #123757197RC0002

Can you provide a reference to the definitive source of Provincial & Federal numbers so we can document the new properties?

Company: "Light" parenthood

2007-10-16T01:59:15.0007Z

Those examples sound more like 'started by prior employees of' rather than a formal connection. If a company spins out another one that may be a solid enough relationship to model. But im not sure what we would call this 'light' parenthood property which begs a better definition for the semantics. I do think that the influence node idea could be applied to companies and products though, and perhaps that is best explored as a co-type for now.

Company: Suggested properties for Company of State/Provincial and Federal Incorporation Numbers

2007-10-03T04:28:09.0005Z

Any company that's incorporated in Canada provincially and/or federally has an incorporation number. I suspect this is probably true in the USA as well. The Strategis Canada Canada Corporations database lets anyone search for a federally incorporated company. You can see from the query screen that Corporation Number is a search field.

URL: http://www.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_mrksv/corpdir/dataOnline/search.cgi?lang=e

I'd like to suggest that the properties of State/Provincial Incorporation Number and Federal Incorporation Number be included for Company.

Company: "Light" parenthood

2007-09-20T17:14:20.0000Z

This new property would be analogous to the "influence node" property, but would apply to companies, not to persons.

Company: "Light" parenthood

2007-09-20T16:49:41.0005Z

Currently, "company" has a property called "parent" (converse of "subsidiary"). This is fine, but it covers only the legal/commercial kind of filiation among companies. There is another sense of parenthood that I think would be a useful addition to the company type schema: in this sense, "Thinking Machines" is a parent of "Metaweb" and of "Radar Networks"; "OpenLink Software" is a parent of "Zitgist".
In the same vein, institutions such as universities and research centers could also bear a legal/commercial parenthood relationship with their official spinoffs, and another, lighter connection with their "spiritual offsprings".

Company: Financial metrics should be tied to a time period

2007-03-22T06:15:23.0012Z

At the bare minimum, a Revenue or Operating Income or Net Income number has to be associated with a time period during which those numbers were reported. Ideally, they'd indicate whether they're GAAP (or the international equivalent), audited, pro-forma, etc. But it's critical that they be associated with a time period, otherwise they're meaningless.