gmackenz

Person: Relationships

2008-07-25T00:25:57.0012Z

Another long delay - I need to remember to login in more than once a month (or figure out how to get RSS feeds set up).

I guess the real answer to whether the accuracy is needed depends on whether Freebase has aspirations to hold genealogical data. The current scheme isn't adequate for anything genealogical, including medical applications which need genealogical information.

I tend to lean towards the "if you're going to do it, you should do it right" camp, but I recognize that that often leads to over engineering. I don't know anything about how Freebase stores things internally, so it's difficult to evaluate where the "quadrupling" comes in and how big an impact it has in real world terms.

On the other hand, no one's addressed the sibling side of the argument. That could clearly be derived from traversing the parent-child graph as well, yet it seems to have been important enough to record separately (and redundantly).

That's enough lobbying for me though. If anyone ever decides to change the decision, ping me and I'll provide pointers to how things are modeled in the genealogical data world.

Person: Relationships

2008-06-23T20:03:38.0012Z

It’s less a decision to obscure the facts as a lack of a compelling use case for a more complicated model. The current model is simple and handles 95% of the use cases. To complicate the parent-child relationship—quadrupling the amount of information needed to represent it, in even the simplest cases—really needs a compelling use case. The blurb can tell human consumers that Gerald Ford was adopted. Is there a need for API-based applications to be able to make that distinction?

Person: Naming

2008-06-23T19:58:15.0000Z

As with many such issues, there is a trade-off between the use cases and completeness. Having proper sorting, name semantics, etc., would all be very cool, but (a) where would we get this data, and (b) who would use it? These are not rhetorical questions; if there is a large store of such data and an interested user community, then it is worth figuring out the answers to these questions.
We could get sorting information from Wikipedia, as category inclusions often include that, and from MusicBrainz, which includes it for all musical artists. Is it worthwhile? How would we model it—as an additional text field, like alias?
Is there a large database of genealogical information that is reconcilable with Wikipedia and of general public interest? Does it have well-structured name information?

Person: Relationships

2008-06-20T19:52:15.0001Z

I just discovered this reply after many months. Sorry for the delay!

In my opinion the privacy concerns are orthogonal and are a red herring here. The participants can believe whatever they want, but biological parents and adoptive parents are undeniably different relationships.

The decision to obscure the facts which our displayed for living people who aren't public personas shouldn't prevent getting the data accurate in the first place. That's not possible with the current schema.

Take a look a Gerry Ford http://freebase.com/view/en/gerald_ford?pid=%2Fpeople%2Fperson%2Fparents. Leaving aside the fact that his grandfather is also listed as a "parent" (apparently the work of mw_template_bot), how would you accurately model his family using the current schema? How would you tell his adoptive parents from his biological parents? How would you tell which female parent went with which male parent? Would all the half-brothers and half-sisters just get linked together in one big undifferentiated pile of "siblings?"

Person: Naming

2008-06-20T19:34:13.0000Z

It would be worth reviewing the practices in the field of genealogy. Doing this in a culturally comprehensive way is non-trivial. Surname or family name and given name are more culturally neutral terms, but you also need to deal with ruf names http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_name, dit names http://www.francogene.com/quebec/ditnames.php, other kinds of aliases (e.g. "William Smith alias Jones") , etc.

In addition to all the names a person used personally, they may also have been called different names in different languages or cultures (e.g. Charlemagne vs Carolus Magnus) where it is useful to have the name tagged with the language.

Person: Privacy concerns

2008-06-20T19:22:30.0000Z

Change banks. Seriously! Your bank has indicated that they really don't care about the security of your money or your personal information. Information like this is widely available from sources other than Freebase.

If you're going to keep the same bank, just lie. They don't care that you said your mother's maiden Deep Azure Blue or Rugby Union. They're just going to check that the response to the challenge matches what you gave them originally (of course that does somewhat defeat the mnemonic value of using easy to remember challenges).

For the more general question of personal data, the approach used by things like WorldConnect (wc.rootsweb.com) is a good starting point. Don't publish personal data on people who are still alive (unless they are a public persona).

metapsyche: We've created a new user level called Expert

2008-06-13T02:28:52.0000Z

My apologies to the planet-hunters whose planets I renamed on Freebase and Wikipedia. I had no right to do that. I just tried to make a systematic way to catalog exoplanets using an open database (freebase). But it turned out to be difficult. Its just that some discoverers put a space after the star name, followed by the letter to denote the planet. While some don't put the space at all. This is prone to duplication errors as what happened to Freebase. I dont know what to do at this point.

metapsyche: Tshirt

2008-06-13T02:09:19.0000Z

Wow! That's great! Thank you, skud ! I'd love to wear a Freebase Freeshirt! :)

metapsyche: Tshirt

2008-06-12T18:54:54.0005Z

Hey, I'd love to send you a Freebase tshirt in thanks for your contributions in Astronomy and other areas. Could you please send me your tshirt size and postal address to kirrily@metaweb.com? Thanks!

metapsyche: We've created a new user level called Expert

2008-06-01T13:45:23.0000Z

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Please have a look at the exoplanets I flagged for deletion, they are using the wrong naming convention. And they are causing duplicate counts on total exoplanets. WASP-6b, WASP-7b, all the way to WASP-15b needs to be deleted, because the correctly named ones already exist (ie, WASP-6 b, WASP-7 b, etc) Also OGLE-2006-BLG-109Lb needs to be deleted. Thanks!

- metapsyche
(a cloud of vapor)

metapsyche: We've created a new user level called Expert

2008-05-30T19:04:02.0007Z

I added you as an expert for Astronomy. Expert currently allows users to edit domain/type descriptions/help, edit the featured topic, and other (soon-to-come) abilities.

Meta-contributors: What belongs in Freebase?

2008-05-12T21:17:00.0000Z

For this project, there are about 3000 sites distributed around the world. Somewhere between 5-10 people would probably be interested in describing them initially. Here is the Freebase topic page: Global Ant Database. The linked publication provides tons of details.

I'm working on several similar collaborations, with an eye on mashups that extend far beyond the individual projects. These collaborations typically involve meta descriptions rather than raw data like you described above.

Meta-contributors: What belongs in Freebase?

2008-05-12T18:31:14.0007Z

Ed,

As usual, it's a tradeoff between the amount of data and the utility of that data. If you were talking about 1000 topics covering the continental US, and of interest/use to people in a particular field of study, then the tradeoff would certainly come down on the side of "do it!" If on the other hand it were 1,000,000 topics and the only people using the data were three researchers, the tradeoff might not really work out so well.

We had this discussion a while ago on the topic of currency exchange rates. Someone (sorry, forget who) had day-by-day exchange rates for every currency on earth for a whole decade. Is this useful in Freebase? We weren't really sure but IIRC we did get them loaded. But if he'd come back and said "ok, now I have hour-by-hour data" we would probably have said, look, that's a fairly ridiculous amount of data; day-by-day is useful to lots of people but anything more detailed is only of use to a very tiny segment of the population. Who really needs to know the exchange rate between the Congolese Franc and the Peruvian Nuevo Sol at 2pm on Christmas Day 1990?

Although our graph store is pretty efficient, loading stuff into it does cost money in terms of hardware, bandwidth, and all that. So we're trying to prioritise a bit. Especially as we ramp up, we're going for stuff that's of the highest utility to the largest population, and are less enthusiastic about stuff that's of lesser utility or only interesting to tiny groups.

So, I know that's not a real answer, but I hope it helps you understand how we come up with answers.

I guess the next question is, how many topics are we talking here, and can you show us a sample of what one such topic might look like (eg. a page about it on another website).

Meta-contributors: What belongs in Freebase?

2008-05-10T00:57:51.0000Z

A collaborator asked about the possibility of adding descriptions of sampled locations to Freebase. He would like to upload a list of sampled location names as topics and attribute those topics with properties that would include links to locations, sampling protocols, species, pictures, summary statistics (e.g., max canopy height), etc. There are metadata standards we could mimic through co-types for import/export (e.g., Biodiversity Information Standards including Darwin Core).

I see two problems:

1) Site/topic names would probably not be intuitive. I doubt any single topic would be the subject of a search. Most likely, topics would be accessed through queries on their properties.

2) There are privacy issues, especially for surveys on private lands and observations of threatened and collectable species.

Is this an appropriate use of Freebase? If so, how should these problems be handled?

Meta-contributors: What belongs in Freebase?

2008-05-10T00:35:05.0012Z

Have a question about whether or not something is appropriate for documenting in Freebase? Ask it here!

Person: Why do some relationships return a null "name".

2008-05-02T21:16:40.0000Z

The discussion fora are a fine place to ask questions. I don’t know if the discussion about Person is the best place for this question, but it’s fine.

The thing attached to the “Spouse (or domestic partner)” property is not a Person, but rather a Marriage. The Marriage is a compound value type connecting two (or more) Persons, as well as other information such as the start and end of the marriage. Since the Marriage CVT doesn’t have a name on its own, the simple form of the query doesn’t have anything to display.

You can try this instead:

"spouse_s" : [ { "id" : null } ]

to find the marriage itself, or:

"spouse_s" : [ { "spouse" : [] } ]

to find the participants in the marriage. The problem with that latter approach is that since the Person from which you’re starting is in the marriage, you will see him or her again; for instance, from Bill Clinton, you will find that his marriage includes Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

CVTs are a powerful design pattern in Freebase, but can be a little tricky to use. The help topic linked above should be of some help.

Person: Why do some relationships return a null "name".

2008-05-02T20:17:00.0012Z

(n00b question, might be wrong forum, sorry in advance, pointers in the correct direction appreciated, etc.)

Anyways, why do some relationships return a null name field? For example, spouse_s, sibling_s, etc. That is, for a query such as the following, the name field comes back null.

{
"query" : {
    "/people/person/spouse_s" : [
      {}
    ],
    "id" : "/en/bill_clinton"
}
}

(yes, I know...insert Bill Clinton joke here)

But I can get Chelsea's name from a similar query for /people/person/children. This seems to imply that I need to get the guid from this query, and re-query for information on Bill's spouse (and siblings, and some others that seem to return a guid+null name)

Freebase Application: Supported platforms / browsers

2008-04-29T20:50:56.0000Z

my bad. I said I'd do it and I only just proposed some schema on the data-modeling list. Versioning of software is a little more complex than one would think. I'll report back here when we have resolution.

Meta-contributors: What are descriptions for?

2008-04-28T18:17:17.0012Z

Each topic in Freebase has a description -- a text/HTML blurb that describes the topic at hand. Many of these are pulled from Wikipedia, but when we create a new topic (or if we decide to replace the Wikipedia one), then what should we put in it?

Some questions to consider:

How long should descriptions be?
Should they be neutral in tone, or do we permit advertising type material for eg. products/companies/etc?
To what extent should they repeat information that is contained in the structured data below?

Meta-contributors: Introduce yourself

2008-04-28T17:59:12.0013Z

Welcome! Please introduce yourself.

I'm Skud (or Kirrily), and I'm the community cat-herd here at Freebase. I'm always interested in suggestions you may have for improving the Freebase community, so please feel free to contact me any time if you've got ideas. In terms of data, I'm a crazy generalist though I do tend to spend quite a bit of time on historical subjects and Australian and other international areas.

Freebase Application: Supported platforms / browsers

2008-04-25T13:22:07.0007Z

No progress on this but I'd like to see it happen. Perhaps when Acre goes public I can work on integrating this type into the Script Editor.

Freebase Application: Supported platforms / browsers

2008-04-16T23:36:33.0000Z

What the status with getting a supported application/OS requirements?

Browser requirement (version/OS).

Flash (yes/no/version).

Person: Privacy concerns

2008-03-05T20:14:08.0012Z

Crossposted from the data-modeling mailing list...

A while ago I signed up for online banking and, as online banking systems tend to do, it asked me not only for a password but for some additional question/answer pairs to help me sort things out if I lost or forgot that password. I looked at the list of suggested questions, and saw things like:

- Mother's maiden name
- Your high school's mascot
- Town where you were born

It occurred to me that almost every item on that list of questions was something that you could find in Freebase, if a person's properties were filled in completely. As you can imagine, this could be a bit scary if someone used the information in FB to login to your online banking.

When you sign up for Freebase you get a "user profile" and then there's a field to link it to a "Person topic about me". That person topic then lets you fill in your mother's maiden name, your high school, the town where you were born, and so forth. I suspect that some people do this a bit naively, hardly thinking about how it could be used for identity theft. (None of *us*, of course! Me, I filled in my mother's maiden name in the full and complete knowledge that the world can use it to access to my bank statements ;))

But now my mother and father have nodes in Freebase, and what's to stop someone coming along and filling in *their* mother's maiden names, high schools, etc? Or for that matter, points that might be sensitive for various reasons, like "weight" or "religion"?

So there's been a bit of discussion around the place about changing the "Person" topic to be less privacy-invading, and moving some of the properties to a new type called "Public person", which we can use for well-known public figures and famous people whose privacy is, let's face it, already pretty well invaded. That way we can record the weight of professional athletes or celebrities with eating disorders, or the religion of Presidents of the USA, or the genealogy of historical figures, without doing the same to ordinary people like you or me.

If we did this, we'd probably then go through and type anyone who has a Wikipedia article as a "public person" for starters. If they meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, then their birthdates and so forth are probably public knowledge anyway. Also, we'd need to write a FAQ or guideline somewhere about what makes someone a public person, and when you should (or shouldn't) apply that type.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

Person: Relationships

2008-02-22T21:46:18.0007Z

People may assume that the biological parent is intended, but the participants in most adoptive relationships prefer to have their relationship assumed to be equivalent to (if not identical to) a biological one. This is really a sort of privacy questions; the fact that you or I were or were not adopted is not of general public interest; the fact that Nicole Richie or Pax Jolie-Pitt are adopted is of broader public interest. This will probably be addressed in the near future by a division of the Person type into public and private sub-types.

Person: Relationships

2008-02-22T20:32:49.0007Z

In the absence of any qualifiers, people are going to assume that "parent" means biological parent. It would definitely be useful to have adoptive relationships (with dates) included as well. The two types of information are both useful. As was pointed out, for some types of research (e.g. medical/genetic) only biological relationships are important.

On the opposite side of things, the "sibling" relationship seems undesirable to have stored explicitly since it can be derived from the other primary relationships.

Person: Naming

2007-09-27T21:31:03.0007Z

This is a tricky problem. Right now, we're just storing variant/alternative names in the "alias" property, which is better than nothing, but as you suggest, doesn't provide any real structure or information about those names. So adding some structure to this is appealing. But from a data-modeling standpoint, I have some questions about this approach: Should multiple middle names be entered as one instance of a property, or as separate instances? If the latter, how do we ensure they're ordered correctly? How do we differentiate between birth-names and names that were taken later (or should we make this distinction at all)? Asian names could probably be dealt with by finding culturally-neutral terminology for "first" and "last" names, although data input and reconciliation will be harder since the names are often ambiguously ordered when they're transliterated.

From a data-acquisition standpoint, I don't think we have any sources currently that model data this way, and doing an automatic extraction from, say, Wikipedia would be fraught with problems. We have, however, been discussing ways to handle pseudonyms/alternate names used by authors and musicians, which could presumably be generalized, and would at least address the pseudonym issue.

Person: Naming

2007-09-24T21:24:55.0005Z

While it seems to make sense that the main name for a person be the arbitrary string most associated with that person, shouldn't this database, like almost every other application that references people I know of, break the name down, i.e., have separate fields for first, middle, last, and post (like III or jr), and then another for "nickname," and yet another for alternative name(s) like pen name (e.g. Mark Twain/Samuel L. Clemens/Sam).

Person: Relationships

2007-09-20T02:24:40.0007Z

It seems to me that the complication is already there, regardless of whether Freebase deals with the complication. Are multiple parents currently impossible? Are bad inferences currently impossible? Are people currently devoid of curiosity regarding parent/child relationships? To what degree will the company Metaweb control Freebase in attempts to avoid offending people? To what degree will the company Metaweb control Freebase in attempts to avoid conflicting or ambiguous data? In any case, what do mediators offer that properties do not offer?

Person: Relationships

2007-09-17T01:16:59.0000Z

It’s a matter of what information is desired. Right now, we only have the parent/child relationship; it doesn’t say whether it’s exclusively biological or adoptive or either. That could easily result in people with multiple parents, or bad inferences, such as someone with two parents who were not married to each other until well after his birth; that could be an out-of-wedlock birth, or it could be a step-parent relationship. Genealogists, people looking for health information, and people curious about nobility would all want to know the specifics of the relationship. But on the other hand, particularly for living people, many people consider an adoptive relationship to be exactly the same as a biological one, and we need (IMO) to be sensitive to that.

Person: Relationships

2007-09-17T00:22:46.0007Z

What is complicated about handling adoptive relationships?

Person: Relationships

2007-09-16T21:08:49.0007Z

I agree with Etan. People can be born into or out of wedlock, and their parents may get married at some later date. If you know who a person’s parents are and you know their birthday, you can then make inferences based on marriages of the parents, but that’s about the best you can do.

A stronger argument for mediators is handling adoptive relationships as well as or instead of biological ones. That gets complicated.

gmackenz: You, sir, are my new best friend!

2007-09-16T20:57:25.0000Z

Nice! I've got a box full of my mum's old stuff from the 50s; she studied at Emily MacPherson College here in Melbourne doing a 2 year (?) diploma of dressmaking and became a professional dressmaker. The books include lots of fashion design sketches, pattern-making theory stuff, and samples of different stitches, techniques, and so on. Must get around to scanning/photographing it all and putting it online sometime.

Person: Relationships

2007-09-16T15:36:00.0007Z

All we need are topics for the persons and the unmediated links between them. Starting with the information about Person-1, a user finds that Person-1 has a child, Person-2. The user can then discover the other recorded parents of Person-2 by examining the information about Person-2, in which information the user finds that Person-2 has a parent, Person-3 . What advantages do mediators offer in cases of this sort?

gmackenz: You, sir, are my new best friend!

2007-09-15T05:57:02.0007Z

So then she'd enjoy (if she hasn't already visited) my wife's Vintage Sewing site of old public domain sewing/patterning/clothing/household books available to the masses.

gmackenz: You, sir, are my new best friend!

2007-09-15T02:38:03.0000Z

I'm luring in a friend of mine who runs a vintage clothing store in Australia and is working on a book on vintage clothing. She wants to categorise styles and details of clothing so that eg. you can know that dropped waistlines were popular in such-and-such a period and high waistlines in these other periods, or whatever.

gmackenz: You, sir, are my new best friend!

2007-09-13T18:42:58.0000Z

An invisible friend from the San Francisco Bay Area who has a secret pash for Regency romance novels. The textiles work is a 'lure' for my wife to investigate/use Freebase. She did a lot of the type associations to topics already.

gmackenz: You, sir, are my new best friend!

2007-09-13T13:56:08.0005Z

Textile data modelling *and* you've been messing with Georgette Heyer novels! *hearts*

Freebase Application: Supported platforms / browsers

2007-08-03T17:33:35.0007Z

seems a no brainer, I'll make a requests to the domain admin.

Freebase Application: Supported platforms / browsers

2007-08-02T15:23:17.0004Z

It would be useful to know which browsers were supported by each application. IE5,6,7 Firefox 1.5,2,3, Safari etc