Discussions on Film genre
Policy to follow about genres.
Hi, I want to use freebase to build a movies sites. I found that the Genres are somehow caotic, with lots of non-sense "genres" examples: Space opera, Spaghetti Western, Coming of age, etc, etc, etc. Could we start to clean this out and define15 or 20 major genres ala IMDB and maybe add a field like "Subgenres" or "keywords" to add all the others related subjecst?
Regards, Mauro
Instead of a new field I found the "Film Subjects" field. So I can move all non major Genres to this field.
Hi Mauro -
I originally had 'film genre' and 'minor film genre' just to clean this up, but it met with strong resistance. People tend to use the level of specificity they think of at the moment they add a genre to a film. Also, people like to put in "romantic comedy" rather than typing as both "romance" and "comedy".
Film genres are what we call a "phylogeny pattern", where each item in the phylogeny can be contained by another. For instance the "satire" genre could include the "political satire" genre. By organizing them this way, it would be possible to ask for all films of type "satire" and see ones that are marked as the more specific "political satire" genre.
What I mean by this is that it's unlikely that we will be able to constrain input on so many movies well enough to keep it 'clean' in the way IMDB is. You would have to get a dozen people to agree that this should all be cleaned up, and you would have to be willing to keep it clean as people enter information.
"Film Subject", by the way, can point to any topic, which is really much less defined than a genre. For instance, it could be "Iwo Jima" or "Global Warming", which are really too specific to define a genre.
Thanks robert
I see your point and I think you're right. I didn't know that the keywords can be contained. If i get it right when I query to get the movies with the "action" genre it will return all those movies that has the "action" keyword regardless if it says "western action" or just "action", I'm right?
