jonathanwlowe

Croatia: Get Spllit in Dalmatia

2008-09-05T18:52:48.0012Z

I totally am into dalmational artworks

Croatia: Get Spllit in Dalmatia

2008-09-05T18:51:34.0021Z

Baybeeee

Paris: Merge, don't delete

2008-08-31T17:58:34.0012Z

Don't delete!

Munich: Don't delete!

2008-08-31T15:59:03.0012Z

No way, don't delete!

Napier: Art Deco City

2008-08-29T04:40:20.0012Z

Cool! If you're interested in promoting Napier's attractions, may I suggest filling in more of the data on the topic page, and perhaps adding some of its Art Deco buildings to the Architecture domain, under the Building type? Just go to that page, click "Add new Building", and start filling in whatever you know.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:46:30.0012Z

Never mind, made a newby mistake on the filter setting.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:41:55.0017Z

Georgia is the only state that is not listed in alphabetical order. Don't know how to fix that.

Granada Hills: Granada Hills

2008-08-25T12:17:41.0017Z

this was flagged by mistake,.,I meant to flag Granada Hills California

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T23:40:12.0012Z

Yeah, I hear you. I was thinking of just an empty topic for use only with addresses. Ugly, but so is having DC missing from addresses. Maybe we should have a poll for which is worse :)

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T21:39:28.0012Z

That's going to cause some bizarreness in terms of data, since some of the data (like the properties on statistical region) apply equally to both the city and the district. To find out information about Washington, DC, users would have to know to look in two places. But I do see your point about the addresses. I'm not sure what the best solution is right now.

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T14:12:23.0012Z

I think we need to split this topic so we have "DC" to put as the state of a US address. (I get that it isn't a state, but it does belong in that field, just like PR.) It is odd because they are one and the same (I think?), but not sure how else to fill in addreses properly.

Ag Hill Upchurch Hall, Auburn: Merge with Ag Hill Upchurch Hall

2008-08-20T19:57:18.0017Z

A review of the maps for Tiger Transit shows that these are the same stop; links to transit lines are here: http://www.auburn.edu/administration/parking_transit/transit/

United Kingdom: Don't merge

2008-08-20T19:45:53.0017Z

The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland is different then just Great Britian; it also includes Northern Ireland (and some other stuff, depending on just how you want to define your various terms). However, this article should be renamed The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland, the correct legal name of the country.

Berlin: split candidate

2008-08-20T18:52:25.0022Z

This bit from the German embassy in Washington makes me think the topic shouldn't be split:

Berlin is both a city and one of Germany's 16 state, so its government must play two roles.

Berlin: split candidate

2008-08-20T18:50:44.0018Z

I don't know much more about Berlin than I just learned from reading the WP article, but from the article it sounds like the city and the state are the same entity, similar to the way Washington DC is both a city and federal district. If this is actually the case, they should continue to share the topic. If they are distinct (but coterminous) entities, spliting might make sense.

Berlin: split candidate

2008-08-19T23:37:41.0012Z

Is there any counter arguments here or should I do the split now? I'd like to add containedby values to the state, but not the city.

Napier: Art Deco City

2008-08-06T01:08:19.0006Z

Napier is an Art Deco city in Hawke's Bay wine country. The city is situated in the midst of New Zealand's oldest wine growing region.

A massive earthquake on 3rd February 1931 destroyed the city. It was rebuilt in the Art Deco, Spanish Mission and other styles of the 1930s.

Today it is a vibrant centre reflecting the vigor and optimism of the Art Deco style.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-04T19:38:49.0016Z

But there's nothing to link "National Day" as it currently exists, to the country it's connected to.

Wrt flags etc, I intended to link to a topic, yes. Because a flag has properties like "Designer", and start and end dates of when it was used. Eg. the US flag has been through various iterations, and Canada had some kind of Union Jack based flag until quite recently, etc. So the flag property should in fact be date mediated ;)

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-04T19:00:48.0012Z

I was thinking (back in my original post), that since "National Day" is already a holiday type, such a property would be a denormalization. We could decide that's okay, but it's not strictly parallel to national anthem, since there is no similar property for song types. Flag and coat of arms are interesting problems -- there's no way to link to an image with a property. The best we could do would be to link to topics like "Flag of Australia" and "Coat of Arms of Austria-Hungary", which would then presumably have pretty pictures. But it's probably a good idea to replicate the "symbol of administrative region" model at the national level. I'll add a task for it.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-02T08:00:05.0000Z

Oh, well, OK! I'm all in favour of a "civic holiday" type or whatever, and linking it to where it's celebrated. But that's not the same as "national holiday". I think it's up there with "national anthem", and while we're at it, let's add "national floral emblem", "national flag", "coat of arms", "motto", etc as properties!

Ahem. I'm *mostly* serious. It might be the Friday night mojitos speaking. But really, all those are structured information that most-tending-to-all countries have.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T23:41:27.0012Z

I don't know about Nebraska Day, but Nevada Day is the last Friday in October (formerly October 31), and I'll lay you odds that some cities do celebrate their founding. But what I actually meant was a general way to capture all civic (as opposed to religious holidays), and places they're celebrated. So that you can see all the civic holidays celebrated in some place, and also see that, for example, ANZAC day is celebrated in both Australia and New Zealand, or that Lincoln's Birthday is celebrated in Illinois, Connecticut and California.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T22:52:35.0012Z

I think the difference is that most countries have a holiday, but most administrative divisions and city/towns don't. I mean, when's "San Francisco Day" or "Nebraska Day"?

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T21:44:53.0012Z

Well, barring yet another type rehash in the Location domain, how about the low-tech, so-simple-it's-dumb solution of creating a holiday property on all three types: country, administrative division, and city/town?

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T20:49:35.0158Z

I'm tempted to broaden this a bit -- National Day is already a holiday category. But the holiday type only has a property for relgions associated with a holiday; it doesn't have a property for places where civic holidays are observed. I think adding a property for the latter would be a better solution. The question for me is -- what should the expected type be? Ideally it should be something that can reciprocate the property. Location seems pretty broad, since rivers, parks, and airports are unlikely to have holidays. We don't really have a type that encompasses all civic types (country, administrative division, city/town).

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T18:12:31.0017Z

Most countries have a national day of celebration for their founding, independence, or similar. Could we make this a property on /location/country? Here's a list of them that I had bookmarked: http://www.kidsturncentral.com/holidays/glossary/defindependence.htm

Location: Contains/Contained By

2008-07-23T15:44:01.0000Z

Can you put a limit on this? I always see more than one level on these items and its frustrating. Can you guys just cap that field at 1?

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-07-09T20:35:32.0000Z

Cool, thanks for the update.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-07-09T18:37:54.0015Z

It looks like the general consensus was in favor of not denormalizing the data, but instead having a synthetic property that could represent current data from the historical data. However, this suggestion is currently not something that is possible, and would require development work. I'll check around to see if there are open tasks for this and update you.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-07-09T15:41:51.0000Z

Did we ever come to a conclusion about this? It seems to have died without an answer in the Data Modeling discussions.

City/Town: Newspapers?

2008-06-30T22:02:22.0005Z

I think a property for "areas covered locally" or something similar would be the best way to capture this. Of course, the trick is then getting the data.

City/Town: Newspapers?

2008-06-29T05:23:31.0012Z

Very specifically, I wanted to ask, "What are the websites of the newspapers in the 3 cities neighboring the Federation of Damanhur?"

Of your two options, if I had to pick one, I would ask, "What newspapers cover a specific city locally?"

For Turin, (for example,) according to Wikipedia, the newspapers are: La Stampa, Tuttosport, and the Turin Metro.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-26T07:14:01.0012Z

Ok, I see, AD is supposed to be vague. What was tripping me up was the ISO and FIPS attributes do have a clearly defined domain. So maybe they should be kicked out into a new type (principal country subdivision?) that US State, Australian State etc. include?

Location: Cemetery - for Deceased Person type

2008-06-25T23:48:56.0012Z

There are over 130,000 cemeteries in the GNIS dataset, nearly all with lat/lon. There are a few untyped cemeteries with names ending in 'Cemetery' that already exist, but are untyped and nearly none of them are tagged with GNIS feature ids. The GNIS set would be useful in reconciliation in determining if an existing topic really is a cemetery, but probably not for a bulk load, unless you want 130,000 new cemetery topics.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-25T19:29:21.0012Z

Administrative division is specifically designed to be somewhat vague, and to be used for everything that falls between the most local government (city/town or equivalent) and the country. I wouldn't call the ISO and FIPs codes "main attributes" -- they're basically just foreign keys. Administrative Division is almost just a "bucket" -- a way to assert that something is an administrative division of a country, and generally bigger than a town. (Some cities are of course both city/towns and administrative divisions.)

Creating separate types for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.-level administrative divisions would probably be even less applicable, since many countries don't have nice clear hierarchies, and in some places the supposed hierarchy is subverted (New York City is the classic example -- its five boroughs are also counties). Using a single co-type for all these things also allows for simpler modeling as well-- if there are only three major types for country divisions, you need fewer properties to link to them and have fewer places where a property might conceivably go.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-25T18:52:38.0012Z

From what I can tell, cities in the US are both naming and administrative. Australian LGAs are mostly administrative divisions, and city/town naming in Australia is separate from them; it comes from the postal system. In large metropolitan areas naming goes state/metro area/suburb (which apparently means 'neighborhood' in USian, and are postal divisions). Suburbs can be split between multiple LGAs, although most are within one.

However the Administrative Division type doesn't fit because its main attributes are ISO 3166-2 and FIPS 10-4 Region Code, which are only defined for Australian States. For the same reason I'd also recommend removing Administrative Division from US County, which is probably the closest analogue to Aus LGA. If required, there's probably room for a new type that is between state and city/town which both of them could include.

City/Town: Newspapers?

2008-06-25T00:51:47.0001Z

Do you have a specific use case in mind? I'm hesitant to add this property to City/Town, because a lot of cities don't have their own newspapers, and a lot of newspapers are regional (Contra Costa Times for Contra Costa County, CA, for example). Is the idea just to be able to see what newspapers cover a specific city locally? Or are you specifically wanting to know what newspapers are based in a given city?

City/Town: Newspapers?

2008-06-24T23:24:37.0012Z

City newspapers? A link to the city newspapers?

For example, Santa Cruz, CA -> Santa Cruz Sentinel.

For example, Seattle -> both Seattle Times & Seattle P-I.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-24T21:38:56.0012Z

No, no, you're not being obnoxious at all -- this is a persistent pattern. I'm guessing that you're looking for the current head of state of each country, as opposed to the office that the head of state holds. A property for "current head of state" on the country type seems reasonable, but I'm going to repost this to the data-modeling mailing list to get more input because I can see a lot of ways for this to snowball. (If you're not on the mailing list, you can join here: http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling, or just watch the outcome here: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/)

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-24T17:55:30.0012Z

Right, I had seen that type, but when trying to query against the database, it seems more helpful if heads of state were given their own type. For instance, if I wanted to see who the heads of state were in the UK and the US, I currently have to sift through the results to find "President of the United States" and "Prime Minister of the UK". If it were in a separate property, I could just ask for the heads of state of each country and receive only them.

Sorry, not trying to be obnoxious.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-23T23:42:55.0012Z

Heads of state (and all other people who hold government offices) can be listed on the "governmental jurisdiction" type. Most countries should have this type already, but if they don't, feel free to add it. There's some documentation for entering data about government office-holders here: http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000739446b.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-23T21:36:06.0012Z

Because Country is a type within Location, I figured I'd ask here: Would it be possible to add "current leader" or "head of state" as a property?

Location: Cemetery - for Deceased Person type

2008-06-21T00:14:54.0039Z

Cemetery as a type is useful for more than just UI enhancement. It's also useful to be able to find all the cemeteries in an area (unless this is already encoded somehow using a generic GNIS place type classification or something).

Location: Could contain "radius"

2008-06-20T20:56:36.0002Z

That would be http://freebase.com/view/user/jonathanwlowe (note the extra 'w') for anyone else trying to track this down.

I couldn't figure out whether the new schema is live yet or not. Is it? SpatialEd's comment about time frames is important and doesn't appear to be addressed by what I could find in the current schema.

Location: Contains/Contained By

2008-06-20T19:33:14.0000Z

One level is sufficient, Tyler. One of our planned features is transitive property comprehension (like containment and organism classification hierarchy), so there is no need to denormalize the hierarchy completely.

Location: Contains/Contained By

2008-06-20T18:48:46.0005Z

How deep should I go? For instance, I'm working on the Empire State Building. Generally, it is contained by New York. If one clicks to see New York, they'll see that the city is contained the state, and the state by the country, then continent, then earth.

In this sense, should I list that the Emprie State Building is contained by: New York, New York, United States, North American, and Earth?

I haven't been doing this because I think its cleaner to just list the most immediate contained by and followed the path if needed. I guess I'm asking is my way correct or not?

Thanks!

Washington: us_state?

2008-06-17T22:55:52.0000Z

counties are defined by the state (with alaska using boroughs and Louisiana parishs). And since this isn't in a state, calling it a county seems odd.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-16T18:27:45.0000Z

Thanks for your comment -- figuring out where different governmental divisions in different countries fit can be a bit of a challenge. LGAs are a bit confusing (at least for this non-Australian) -- some of them seem to essentially correspond to what I would think of as a city (e.g. City of Clarence) but others seem to encompass several smaller towns and open space (e.g. Kingborough Council). Or, in other words, it looked to me like they were a level of government between state or territory and city or town. Which is why I gave the type an included type of administrative division.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-14T18:27:17.0005Z

to quote its description, "This type is for administrative divisions of countries of any level below the country itself and above city or town." ie LGAs don't fit. I've manually removed it from a few topics until I thought to look at the schema.

Washington: us_state?

2008-06-13T21:57:15.0007Z

It shouldn't be typed as a state; it should be typed with /location/us_federal_district instead, since that's what it is. It also seems to be typed with /location/us_county, but I don't know enough about the ins and outs of the district to know if this is accurate, so I'm leaving it there for now.

Washington: us_state?

2008-06-13T01:55:02.0000Z

This topic currently represents both the city of Washington and the federal District of Columbia. I am not sure that this is the correct representation, and perhaps they should be split, but D.C. is more like a state than not.