Hey, what's up?
What about a category or type for "Professional Association?" For example, politican Thomas Menino, Mayor of Boston, used to be the head of the United States Conference of Mayors. Where does that info fit?
Perhaps that would be better expressed as "Political Alliance?"
"Professional Association" could refer to some one belonging to the "Association for the Promotion of Web 2.0" of some such...
Thoughts?
Thanks, Dennis
Dennis, I think this is best modeled by the Organization and Organization member types. Menino’s leadership, on the other hand, of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, would be modeled as having a board position in that organization, specifically that of Chair or President or whatever they call it.
I'm sorry. I did not see the category, if that is the correct term, of organization associated with the category "person." Or at least I don't remember seeing it.
Can you put me straight on where to find it?
Thanks, Dennis
Organization is a type located in the organization domain.
Should we capture the datum that someone is self-educated? Informal education? Would the Education Property be modified to allow non-standard education processes outside of the standard Collegiate system?
Here's an example from our pal Wikipedia:
"Giambattista della Porta spent the majority of his life on scientific endeavors. He benefited from an informal education of tutors and visits from renowned scholars..."
Or even better, Abraham Lincoln:
"Lincoln's formal education consisted of about 18 months of schooling, but he was largely self-educated and an avid reader."
That’s a good question, Gordon. It’s not something easy to structure; in some sense, the most accurate fix might be to change the property name to “Formal Education.” We could add the School of Hard Knocks or what have you as institutions… This is strongly related, if not identical, to the general problem of negative assertions, such as the infamous promiscuous polymorphous polymath None.
Hi, given that there's really just a handful of major religions in the world and I think they're all in Freebase, how would the administrators of the People domain feel about making the Religion property of the Person type display as an enumerated list? It would cut down on errors creating new Religions by mistake, simply because users are new to autocomplete. One example is a new user-created Religion titled "Jewish" while expected behavior would be to select "Judaism" from the list supplied by autocomplete.
Of course it does make creating new Religions harder, but I think there should be little need to do so assuming we've got all the Religions here (note: not meant to be taken as social commentary). ;) Users can always go to the Religion domain and enter new topics there. The goal is to avoid unintentional mistakes due to confusion regarding autocomplete. What do you think?
I really don’t think that would be feasible.
Accidentally-created religion names should be added as aliases (“Jewish” for “Judaism”) but attempting to enumerate religions is only going to lead down a rathole.
Yeah...I was afraid you would say that. I guess there's no way to avoid gardening. I've de-typed several things including "Aircraft" and the Song "Undecided" as a Religion, and was looking for ways to avoid it.
May I request the administrators to add a Property Description to the Religion property to guide users? "Examples: Jainism, Roman Catholicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Evangelicalism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism..."
A lot of people are using the "Topic About Me" property in their user profile to link to articles about things they generally identify with (professions, ideas, sports, etc.), creating a lot of mis-typed People topics. I think "Me on Freebase" or "Me as a Topic" would be a better name to discourage this behavior. Maybe also adding an "Interests" field would give people a place to put the more general topics they want to link themselves to.
This is probably not the right place to ask this question, but I could not find a domain which seemed appropriate for this. I have a couple of types - Mythological figures, Mythological Systems - which I've been using to disambiguate topics like "Paris (City)" and "Paris (Mythological Figure)". Would this need a separate domain? None of the existing ones seem appropriate.
Hi, a lot of mythological figures were worshiped as gods and goddesses in Ancient Greece and Rome, and to a lesser degree, still are. Now that we have a Religion domain, those figures can be typed Deities:
http://www.freebase.com/view/filter?id=/religion/deity
Wildly belated reply, but I just saw this conversation. Not all mythological figures are deities. For instance, King Arthur and indeed everyone in that story eg. Merlin, Guinevere, etc. (Sorry, don't know much about classical mythology, so can't give an example from ancient Greece or Rome.)
Arguably, Arthur et al. are legendary figures, which is a slightly different sort of thing (although the line is probably hazy at the boundaries). But your main point is correct -- there are lots of people, animals, monsters, whatnot, that are in myths who are not at all deities (Odysseus, Medusa, Pegasus, etc.). I don't have any clever ideas about where to put them, however.
Kirrily: I agree, not all mythological figures are deities. I'm glad you brought it up; I do think a Myth/Legend domain would be useful here. Before venkytv posted this, I had started a similar post (with a mythological figure type in my own domain). In response, I believe it was crism who pointed out that tagging someone's god as mythological might not be sensitive to that religion and adherents thereof. The Religion domain was in the works then, so to keep our users informed of the new domain I felt compelled to point out the Deity type.
As for King Arthur himself, historians disagree as to whether it was based on any historical fact (with some apparently quite insistent on that the man really existed). I gave him the benefit of the doubt when I had to pigeon-hole him a while back (for the purpose of automating autocomplete/search test cases), and tagged him as a Person/Deceased Person. But feel free to correct that if needed -- I'm definitely not an expert on King Arthur. ;)
The differences between legend and myth can sometimes be subtle (it doesn't help that the two words are often used interchangeably in English), and if you throw in forklore too... This might be something worth bringing up on the data modeling mailing list, where we have a larger audience and it's easier to hold longer back-and-forth discussions.
Santa Claus: truth or myth? Bring on the edit wars!
Has anyone modelled urban legends? *ponders snopes.com*
I've edited a few things in the Religion type, as has someone else. I'm trying to clear some things up for myself:
Should topics be limited to specific religions, or should it include descriptions of religions? For example, there is currently a "Monotheism" and "Abrahamic Religion" topics, which aren't religions, but a description. I'm wondering if that might be better as a property?
I would be happy to admin this type if necessary.
We're currently developing a new domain for religion, with a number of new types and a new model - it should be visible sometime in the next week.
We'll definitely need some help filling it out once it's up, so I'll drop a note on your profile page when it's ready. Thanks for the interest!
Then I'll stop tinkering in there for now.
I can't find a place to stick clothing; things like Rusty, Electric, Levi's, and Oakley (along with any other fashion related stuff people might be interested in) don't have a type right now. Oakley, Inc. is labeled as 'company' but that moves away from their product line.
Could Clothing be stuck under People? Or is there a better place for it?
Clothing will probably exist in a 'fashion' domain. You're welcome to create types in your private domain space for clothing line and/or brand. Company will likely link to topics like this via a property called 'product' or 'product line'. We hope to add more domains, such as fashion, in the coming weeks.
I keep on coming across people in the Wikipedia who have college degrees, but I'm not sure where to put the information. If there's a right place, could someone point me in the right direction? If not, please consider this a feature request that the Person schema should have a property for representing degrees along the following lines:
degree name: PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, Honorary Doctorate, ...
degree-granting institution: Slippery Rock State Tech, Harvard, ...
date degree was received
I actually have a schema for this all modeled for the education domain, but I keep breaking things on the sandbox when I load it there; hopefully I'll have it debugged soon.
This is the intent for the type called 'education' - see: http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=%2Feducation%2Feducation
We'll likely be adding a property to person for education soon.
I've got this working now -- you can now add someone's education history from the person schema, or add students and graduates to an educational institution from the /education/institution schema.
