TV Actor

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 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 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 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 ?