Discussions on Poem

Hi Mark,

I think my reply to your other post is relevant here as well. Published Work and Written Work are included types of Poem (meaning a new poem topic you create will automatically be typed Published Work and Written Work as well), because we find that relationship to be generally true.

Authorship is a basic shared property of all Written Work: be it a Poem, Short Story, Short Non-fiction, or Review. It's not a conflicting relationship, but an inclusive relationship. The fact that there's no direct link between a Poem and a Poet is unfortunate, but I'll leave that to be answered by an admin in this domain.

The publishing domain is one of the more complex (and well thought out) domains in Freebase. I suggest taking a look at the list of help documents at the top of the domain page. They go through how to enter different types of data in detail. It may sound straight-forward, until you realize the data model allows you to input a collection of translated excerpts of non-fiction work in a periodical -- that kind of data modeling requires some complexity, which unfortunately does make the simple case a little more complex as well.

Oh, one more thing. Bear in mind that there's heavy refactoring work going on here, so what you see is not necessarily what will be.

I'd add, to Faye's excellent explanation, that the documentation might be a bit out of synch with the current model -- we're in the middle of refactoring this domain, and I wanted to hold off redocumenting until the schema was stable. I hope to fix this soon!

With regards to the question that Faye fobbed off on me (as a domain admin, that is), the reason that "poem" doesn't link directly to "poet" is because to do so would create a denormalization -- people would have to enter the poet both in the poem type and written work type. "Written work" contains properties, including author, that are common to all kinds of written works, making it more consistent to query and enter.

What conflicts do you see between written work, published work, and poem?  I've tried to make these complementary, but if I've missed something, I'd like to know so I can fix it.

Thanks for the replies.  Unfortuantely, I don't have too much time to deal with the intricacies of data modeling, but I do like to throw my hat in the ring now and then.

 It's quite interesting, however, to dive in deeper and see some of the complexities that you're dealing with.  I'll keep adding data whenever I can =)

Not to gang up on you, but it does bother me that the Poet type is pretty much an empty label, tagging an author as a poet. Do we need such a data-barren label? Why not just do away with it altogether?

The singular "Poetic School or Movement" property could be easily merged into a more general "Literary School or Movement" that would hang off of the Author type. That a person can be labeled as a Poet could be entered in the Profession property of the Person type, if at all.