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  1.  

    Job Titles

    3 posts, latest post: faye, 3 days ago
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    1. evening
      Sep 18, 2008
      evening says:

      I was adding some of ExxonMobil's major subsidiaries, and I noticed that nanette had created job titles with the subsidiary names in the title.  Those are easy to handle - the subsidiary should go into the employer field instead of the parent company.

      However, how do we want to handle divisions and non-subsidiary entities?  For example, "Executive Vice President, Exxon Mobil Saudi Arabia".  I don't see Exxon Mobil Saudi Arabia as a legal subsidiary, so it is probably an organizational "division".   Another example: Vice President, Washington Office.

      I'm not sure what the goal is for the title - do we want all VP's to be just "Vice President", or do we want the additional information like office or division included to differentiate from other VPs in that company?

      2. jeff
        Sep 18, 2008
        jeff says:
        I think in a case like this, where we don't really know what sort of thing Exxon Mobile Saudi Arabia is, the best thing to do is leave it as-is, rather than guessing whether it's a division or subsidiary (Goliath calls it a subsidiary, but I could find no record on Exxon's website, as you no doubt saw as well).  In terms of whether people should be said to be employed by a division, and thus use the title without the division, or be said to be employed by the company, and thus use the title with the division, I'm not really sure which is best.
      3. faye
        3 days ago
        faye says:
        Regarding job titles, having worked briefly in a large company where every floor had half a dozen VPs, I can tell you there's a huge difference between say, "VP, LargeInvestmentBankRUs", "VP, LargeInvestmentBankRUs France", and "VP, Fixed Income, LargeInvestmentBankRUs Hong Kong". I know nothing about Exxon Mobil's internal organization, but I'm pretty sure division and region qualifiers in front of job titles like "president" and "manager" are significant.

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  2.  

    Scant type system?

    5 posts, latest post: shomoa, Sep 16, 2008
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    1.
      Sep 15, 2008
      romualdjackyro says:

      I was expecting to find such advanced types as "novelist", "poet" etc in addition to "author" for, say, an entry like "Jack Kerouac".

      I guess the only reason the type system is not so specialized is because most of entries are just "data skeletons" built on Wikipedia articles and the like.

      Are such refined types supposed to be added manually by users? 

      2.
        Sep 15, 2008
        romualdjackyro says:

        Ok, perhaps I should have read the tutorial to the site before posting. :)

        Anyway, it appears that "poet", "novelist" and such are implemented through the Profession field.

        Is this the right choice? I mean, does one always need to perform X professionally in order to be recognized as an X-doer?

        And when is a poet considered professionally one? When he's sold some books? And so what about poets of the past, who were recognized as such long after they had died?

        I think the question is raised here as to when to consider someone to be an X, where X is a "profession". Perhaps the success factor is involved.
        This problem is tied to encyclopoedias in general I guess. 

      3. skud
        Sep 15, 2008
        skud says:

        Weeellllll... generally we are a bit wary of creating types which wouldn't have any properties.  What types would "novelist" have that "author" doesn't?  Can the same effect be achieved through a query along the lines of "show me authors who have written novels"?

         When it comes to poetry, I think there's a stronger case for having a "poet" type, since poems are a different kind of written work which have interesting properties like "metre" and "form" that don't apply to other written works, and are often published and anthologised very differently from other written works. 

        Perhaps Jeff, who is responsible for much of our Publishing domain, could chime in here?

      4. jeff
        Sep 16, 2008
        jeff says:
        The reason there aren't types for poet, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, etc. is that, apart from being able to say that "X is a novelist", there aren't really any properties that could go on these types (Kirrily's comments about poetry apply to poems, rather than poets).  I agree that profession isn't adequate for what you're looking for.  We do have separate types for a few kinds of written work -- short story, poem, review, play, scholarly work -- that you can filter on, as Kirrily suggests. But we don't really separate out other types of books, though -- there's no real way to differentiate novels from anthologies from self-help books from dictionaries, apart from the "genre" property (which might help you with the self-help books, but probably won't with the novels).
      5. Sep 16, 2008
        shomoa says:

        >>> The reason there aren't types for poet, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, etc. is that, apart from being able to say that "X is a novelist", there aren't really any properties that could go on these types.

        Yes I had come up with this too on my own, but later.

        Anyway, in a future where a moltitude of people could be using the database don't you think it would be quicker and more straightforward to just query for "X of type = poet that blah blah" instead of "X of type = person and profession = poet that blah blah". This could be compared to 'syntactic sugar' (as in programming).
        The system you've created allows for great flexibility and if space isn't any problem you should consider the possibility to "flatten" this "propertized" types to true types instead of fields.

        Regarding genres I think that a notable issue is raised here, namely who decides what types something is. For most things types aka genres aka categories are obvious but with some works things may get more complicated and subtle... What is Noah to you? If I add the Fictional Character type to its entry would you be outraged? You know there are people in our world that would be. 


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  3.  

    Health care

    1 post, latest post: bluesky77, Sep 11, 2008
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    1.
      Sep 11, 2008
      bluesky77 says:

      Hanoi French Hospital

      www.hfh.com.vn


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  4.  

    Broader / narrower?

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    4 posts, latest post: jeff, Sep 2, 2008
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    1.
      May 19, 2007
      mdresser says:

      Perhaps a "Broader field of study" and "Narrower fields of study" or "Subdisciplines" property would be useful in organizing these? (i.e. Business Administration is a subdiscipline of Business)

      2. avic
        Sep 2, 2008
        avic says:
        I agree. Currently, for example, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics are all simply "feilds of study". That's fine as far as it goes, but within the philosophy feild of study type we should be able to specify that ethics, epistemolgoy and metaphysics are subdisciplines. I'm not sure what a good name for the reciprocal property of "super-discipline" would be. Perhaps something like "is a subdiscipline of"
      3. avic
        Sep 2, 2008
        avic says:
        Just posting this to crosspost this disscussion.
      4. jeff
        Sep 2, 2008
        jeff says:
        That seems pretty reasonable to me, so I added the two properties to the Field of Study type.

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  5.  

    Journal article type

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    1 post, latest post: avic, Sep 2, 2008
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    1. avic
      Sep 2, 2008
      avic says:

      There doesn't appear to be a type for journal article. There is journal issue, but this doesn't quite cover it. It would be very useful for academic research to have a journal article type which would be for a specific journal article. 


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  6.  

    Philosophy

    4 posts, latest post: avic, Sep 1, 2008
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    1.
      Jul 31, 2007
      psygnisfive says:

      We need a type for philosophies. We've got topics on all sorts of philosophies, but they tend to be labeled as film or book subjects.

      2. danm
        Aug 15, 2007
        danm says:

        What are some examples? Do you also have ideas for what properties might be applied to these philosophies?

      3.
        Aug 31, 2007
        psygnisfive says:

        Examples? Sure. Existensialism is a typical example of a philosophy. As for what properties, I'm not sure. I imagine something like what the main focus of the philosophy is (e.g., some philosophies focus more on epistemology than on metaphysics, especially postmodernist philosophies), or what type of philosophy, etc. Wikipedia's philosophy portal would be a good model.

      4. avic
        Sep 1, 2008
        avic says:
        I don't think it would be terribly useful to have a type for "a philosophy". There isn't really such a thing a philosophy, only various collections philosophical ideas. I would recommend creating types for philosophy subtopics such as epistemology, metaphysics, phil of language, ethics, etc. There could also be types for schools of thought such as utilitarianism, existentialism, functionalism (to name a very random assortment from different areas of philosophy).

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  7.  

    Non-events

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    4 posts, latest post: mfcrawford, Aug 16, 2008
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    1.
      Aug 15, 2008
      mfcrawford says:
      I've been slowly adding the historical results of baseball's world series, and in thinking about the 1994 world series, I hit upon a bit of a hurdle: this world series didn't occur.

      As a piece of information, this fact seems relevant to me. However, in terms of integrating the "non-event" into the site, it really doesn't fit at all with the structure of all the other world series results, namely, "winner, loser, score", etc.

      I guess that my question, then, is how is one to deal with non-events that are nevertheless relevant precisely because of their exceptionalism? The expectation of a world series in 1994, given the pattern set both before and after the cancelled season, separates this instance from all others in its class. However, since the actual event never occurred, I’m not sure if representing it in the current schema is either (i) possible or (ii) desirable.

      There are other examples of this kind of expected-but-never-occurred event, notably in sports, and I was wondering if there are any ideas/suggestions on how to represent this type of information.

      Thanks
      2. narphorium
        Aug 15, 2008
        narphorium says:

        That's a good point. Just because an event doesn't appear in Freebase doesn't mean you can assume that it didn't occur.

        I would model this by co-typing the 1994 World Series topic with a Canceled Event type and then maybe add a property to say why it was canceled.

      3. crism
        Aug 15, 2008
        crism says:
        Ditto what Shawn said; a new type seems the best way to handle this. I would also strongly recommend bringing up this discussion on the data-modeling mailing list.
      4. Aug 16, 2008
        mfcrawford says:
         cool, thanks for the feedback. I will definitely bring this up on the list.

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  8.  

    Any one creating patent reference map with freebase

    2 posts, latest post: crism, Aug 14, 2008
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    1.
      Aug 14, 2008
      abon says:

       

      I'm a newbbie around here.

      So far I only got the idea that freebase is for wikipedia data only.

      How 'm I going to use other database like USPTO ?

      2. crism
        Aug 14, 2008
        crism says:

        I can see how you got that idea, since most of our textual articles came from Wikipedia. However, the structured data came from many sources, including MusicBrainz, the SEC, and Freebase users like you.

        Strictly, you can’t use other databases in Freebase; this is one database. (Well, OK, two or three. Still.) But you could import patent databases into Freebase, assuming that they are compatibe with our Creative Commons licensing requirement. Check out the US Patent type for the very small set of examples already populated.


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  9.  

    Renaming the money category to Commerce

    4 posts, latest post: crism, Aug 13, 2008
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    1.
      Aug 4, 2007
      postmodernmarvel says:

      As I was looking through the categories, it came to me that perhaps money is too broad for the types beneath. Money has an overarching quality that is not expressed in the types. Money is more like history. It is a property of or involved in more topics than we'd like to admit.

      In contribution to the community,

      PMM

      2. sgmils
        Aug 7, 2007
        sgmils says:

        Hey, PMM. Thanks for the suggestion.

        On the Domains & Types page, "Money" is just a label for the collection of domains listed under it. That is, the things labeled as domain categories (including money) aren't part of the data structure per se. Instead, they're navigational elements to help people find related data. So toward that end, we're going for broad labels.

        I'd say that "Commerce" is too narrow for the domains and types collected there, but it's certainly possible that another term would better help people find the data.

        Sarah

      3.
        Aug 13, 2008
        tchiphead2 says:

        Speaking of changing it to commerce

        what about a classified section? Or have I just missed it?

        If there isn't one, there should be.

      4. crism
        Aug 13, 2008
        crism says:

        What would go in a classified section? Freebase is not really intended for ephemeral data such as classified ads themselves; we would quickly be full of obsolete listings. We could certainly model information about classified ads, but I am not sure what that would entail.

        If you are thinking we should actually have classified ads—well, I’m not one of the Metaweb business people, but I can’t imagine that competing with Craigslist is something that would make our investors happy. (-: And remember that nothing in Freebase is ever deleted—not really an ideal tool for classified ads.


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  10.  

    /type/people/person?

    also posted to
    3 posts, latest post: bouncinglime, Aug 5, 2008
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    1. bouncinglime
      Aug 1, 2008
      bouncinglime says:
      Considering there's no data in it, I think that this was accidentally typed /people/person. It should probably be removed.
      2. crism
        Aug 1, 2008
        crism says:
        I see skud already removed it. Please keep in mind that Freebase is a community-edited Web site; that means that the community—meaning you—can and should edit it when you find problems. Any logged-in user can remove a type from a topic by using the little drop-down arrow under the type’s name.
      3. bouncinglime
        Aug 5, 2008
        bouncinglime says:
        I had tried it, but for some reason the change didn't go through. Thanks, though, both of you. ^_^

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