Discussions on Data Modeling Guide

Hi wellstone,

 FYI - most locations include the type statistical region which has a property for population (ECT of dated integer).  If you look at the earth, the value for 2007 has already been inputted.

You can't add a property to a type unless you are an administrator of that type. 

It looks like interior artwork is attributed through the issue's Contents property, which links to the comic_story_printing CVT, which links to comic_book_story, which already has properties for penciler and other artists. This was probably done because a single issue might have multiple stories illustrated by multiple artists.

So, it is already possible to add the penciler of interior artwork but you must do that through comic book story instead of issue. It would be nice though if you also linked story to issue through printing by attributing all those properties too.

Thanks for the reply. It makes sense now, although it would be more discoverable if the comic_book_issue itself also had the Penciler property which could contain all the values from individual stories contained in the issue.

Is it possible to become a type administrator or can only the freebase employees do this? What's the best way to contact an admin with a suggestion?

There may be something I am missing: it looks like you’ve answered your own question! (“If you want to change that name, and you have the necessary permissions, you can change it on that other type.”) I’ll try to break it down, though.

When looking at the schema for a type, you can only edit the properties on that type. The “linked in as” is the name of the reciprocal property on some other type, so you can’t edit that directly; you must visit the other type to change it.

To create a “linked in as,” a reciprocal property, is very simple. Once you have a property from one type to another, go visit the schema for that other type. At the bottom of the schema editor, you will see “Suggested Properties”; these are un-reciprocated incoming properties from other types. If you edit the name of one of those, you have not only picked up a new property with its “linked in as” already set, you have now changed the “linked in as” on the other type.

Please note that the schema editor is being redesigned, so the details of this process (though not the fundamental concepts) may change.

Now, if you don’t have the rights to edit the other type, you’re out of luck. Let’s say you make a private type called Hater with a property called “People Hated” that expects Person. Unless you’re an administrator of the People domain, you can’t reciprocate that property as “Hated By.” And that’s just as well; we don’t want everyone on the system to be able to edit all the types, which is why we have the administrator system in place. If you think that known by whom a person is hated is critical information to the Freebase community, you can ask the People administrators to reciprocate the property, or even to promote your Hater type into their domain.

Does that help? 

That's actually a good way of explaining reciprocal properties.

Do you know how much lag time to expect from the time a property is put up, to when the suggested property appears on the other type?

Welcome to Freebase, Stephanie! It’s good to see you’ve been exploring and making some useful contributions.

1) We’ve actually been trying to avoid the “List of Foo” topics from Wikipedia; in general, we feel that they are a compensation for Wikipedia’s lack of structure. The Freebase type system generally provides a better way to organize that kind of information.

For example, if there were a Hot Air Balloon Festival type (which there will be as soon as any Freebase user is interested enough in hot air ballooning to create it), then the List of Hot Air Balloon Festivals would simply be the list of instances of that type. Even better, it could be sorted or queried by any of the properties that the type provides, such as date or location.

The Billboard list is a more interesting case. That’s not really just a list; it’s also an assertion of a special status of its members as distinguished from their peers, a kind of award or recognition. There is currently some interesting discussion on how to approach list-type awards (such as the AFI 100 list of films or the Fortune 500), which would be applicable here. I don’t know what the right answer is right now.

2) Any Musical Track could be co-typed as an Award-Winning Work and the awards thus attached. That said, I am leery of mass imports of Musical Tracks (as opposed to Songs or Compositions) because reconciliation is so very difficult. If this area interests you, I strongly recommend joining the Music Modeling Interest Group and/or the data-modeling mailing list.

Thanks for your suggestions and questions!

Hey,
Thanks so much for your reply. I guess the real question has to do with importing this information. I have a group of people who are able to start adding data to freebase, but we want to do bulk imports instead of doing it by hand. I guess this is essentially adding topics of a certain type or adding properties to an existing topic in bulk. Can you tell me who i should ask about how to format this and upload?

Thanks!

"person" is another example of this.  There is a "person" type in freebase.  There is also a "person" topic (which references the wikipedia article on
person") 

 The way this is currently handled is: the topic and the type are two different objects in freebase.  The topic is marked as an instance of a type called: "type/domain equivalent topic". This may seem a little odd but I think it's a way of clearly separating types from topics.

 Whether a topic, such as "Talaria" merits having an equivalent type is up for debate. We're talking about a mythical, arguably fictional thing that is probably only talked about as a concept, i.e. no one talks about *that* particular Talaria and how fine it was.  What would be an "instance" of talaria? I don't think there's any practical value of having such a type.

So, by this criteria, having a type "Sandal" is practical: instances could include consumer products (e.g. "The Birkenstock Arizona") And the "Sandal" type could be included by another type "Huaraches" referring to the subset of sandals found mostly in Mexico.

I'm sorry, I'm not helping with the root question "how could we get WordNet data in freebase"

Maybe alternatively create a 'WordNet entry' type, add that to the topics that are listed in WordNet and add such fields as 'hypernyms', 'hyponyms', 'meronyms', et cetera.

Or is that too specific to one data source?

I think that Freebase’s internationalization makes a difference here; to me, words should be distinct from concepts, but connected. For instance, the topic for dog has names in multiple languages (page down in the Explore view), and not everything that WordNet will have to say about “dog” will apply to the organism. I would make a type for Word (with a “Language” property) or for English Word to use for WordNet topics, and link the Word instances with the topics that they describe in English.

The hypernym/hyponym relationships apply not only to the words but to the topics themselves (e.g., that “dog” is a hyponym of “animal” implies that a dog is a kind of animal), and that information could be applied to the topics themselves, but the words have, IMO, an independent existence.

WordNet keeps separate relationships for each of the senses. Still, it'd be hard to map those, maybe.