TV

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: 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: 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: 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: 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".

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-10T18:42:37.0000Z

I think your model is pretty close to what we need, if we change the name to something like "Mulit-part TV Episode". The only other things I would change would be to make the links from "multi-part tv episode" to "season" and "series" be one-way, so that they aren't listed on the main series and season pages. (My thinking for this is that, with the exception of Dr. Who, it's not especially useful, and perhaps a bit confusing to have separate lists for "episodes" and "multi-part" episodes.) The "season" property should also be non-unique, since the ST:TNG two-parter that Faye found actually bridges two seasons. Otherwise, I think it should work fine.

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-09T03:57:29.0006Z

If anyone would care to take a look at the type I created and tell me how to improve upon it for any multi-part episodes (it may already be...) I would be happy to make those adjustments so others can use it.

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-09T01:16:42.0006Z

This is a great idea, but it sounds like it may need to be expanded to include any multi-part episode?

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-08T19:39:22.0006Z

Star Trek also had serial stories containing multiple episodes, such as the following story below that was split into the third season finale and the first episode of the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was not happy about it getting typed as a TV series episode when I added it as part of the series. I think a "TV series serial" type would be useful in this situation.

http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f800000000022ec00

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-08T18:53:28.0006Z

No, I think you're doing the right thing. The typer was going off the Wikipedia infoboxes, which use the same template for Doctor Who episodes and serials, so the two were getting conflated. By separating them out, you're actually improving the data, so please! keep up the good work. If the "TV series serial" pattern is (or was) common, we should consider adding it to the public TV domain, but, at the moment anyway, I haven't been able to find any other shows that use it, so we'll hold off on that.

TV: Damn the Metaweb bot

2007-05-08T05:41:01.0012Z

It didn't help that I was confusing myself by creating unnecessary personal types and getting unnecessarily complicated, but I figured out that the Metaweb bot has been "correcting" things for me. I'm working on an extensive Doctor Who dataset. I created a type to use called "TV Series Serials" because the early Doctor Who had episodes contained within the serial stories. Unfortunately, there are Wikipeda entries for each of the serial stories, not each episode, and you Metaweb has been importing them (and un-correcting them after I correct them) as episodes, which they are not.

Can you fix this? Or am I doing it wrong and supposed to fall in line with what the bot is telling me?

TV: TV Series "seasons" and other naming

2007-03-02T03:53:11.0012Z

The type "TV Series seasons" is oddly plural - it makes for some strange UI such as "Create New TV Series seasons" - perhaps it could be plural

Also, I'm finding myself wanting to type "TV episode" but finding it frustrating that I have to type "TV Series episode" to get autocomplete to match. I think a few of the TV types could add aliases (also known as's) with the word 'series' dropped to aid autocomplete

TV: Kevin Bacon as "Himself"

2007-02-25T04:27:16.0011Z

I just though this through more from last week and I changed my mind.

I changed the Kevin Bacon TV show appearance to make the character "himself" rather than "Kevin Bacon". I think that this makes more sense for a variety of reasons. In particular, Kevin Bacon really isn't a fictional character. Second, it is very confusing in the UI (and probably any TV application based on this data) to show to show the same data in two different properties simultaneously. Third, Kevin Bacon really isn't a TV character at all in the sense that "Gilligan" and "James T. Kirk" are. The "himself" construct is much more lightweight and appropriate.

The one worry that 'himself' will collect all male actors playing themselves in TV shows is a valid one, but I also think it's acceptable since the queries that you would normally expect will be possible (eg. "show me all famous people who made guest appearances on Extras").