merge_bot

Olympic Games: athletes by country: Beware of Long Lists!

2008-08-29T06:36:47.0012Z

No worries. As a programmer, I probably should have realized the limitation of what I was trying to do and in the end it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-29T06:31:11.0012Z

Hi parity, minor point: you don't need to send your authentication cookie for doing mqlread (only for mqlwrite).

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-29T05:33:55.0012Z

I suspect /api/service/mqlread is returning a timeout or error. My Perl is rusty, but the until loop doesn't look like it's checking for a 200 OK return response; it just looks like if you don't find a cursor, you assume the counting is complete and exit.

Help Center: Batch update data

2008-08-29T04:42:45.0012Z

The only real "batch update" tool in Freebase is the list importer. If there were a link from the timezone to "places in this timezone" then you could do "import list" to do what you ask, but since there is no such link, I think you'll probably have to use the API.

Olympic Games: athletes by country: Beware of Long Lists!

2008-08-29T04:40:52.0012Z

Yeah, the import tool can be a bit of a pig on long lists. I usually try to do it in batches, myself. Sorry it caused you trouble :(

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.

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-29T04:36:25.0012Z

Hi Shaki, and welcome to Freebase. Freebase is a structured database of information about people, places, and other things like that. It's not a political forum. If you'd like to contribute structured information about President Musharraf, such as his political offices held, places lived, etc etc, that would be very welcome. However, if you want a political debate, you'll probably want to go somewhere else for it.

Post-Abstract Expressionism: Wow!

2008-08-29T04:32:46.0000Z

Hi Martin! Glad to be able to please someone so easily :) Freebase is more "inclusionist" than Wikipedia, so we often have things they don't. We'd welcome further information on this art movement, if you'd like to help us out with it -- perhaps some information on other artists associated with the movement, or key artworks in the movement. Perhaps you could also fill out some of the information on the Martin Hedgecoke topic?

4. Metaweb Read Services: c# example

2008-08-29T04:26:34.0012Z

Thanks, weblivz! Probably the best place to put this is under Application Developer Tips, but I'm copying our docs guy, Phil, on this so he can help you out.

damirworld: Welcome

2008-08-29T04:23:38.0005Z

Hi, Damir, and welcome to Freebase. I see you're trying to publicise yourself as an activist and rapper. We welcome contributions of this kind, but I suspect you'd have more luck if you were to start with a Musical Artist topic (go to Musical Artist then click "add new Musical Artist") and fill in information there. Then you can add links, pictures, a description, and some structured information about yourself and your music, which is what Freebase is all about.

Blue Byte Studio: Blue Byte Studio == Blue Byte Software

2008-08-29T04:01:00.0017Z

Looks to me like Blue Byte Studio is the same as Blue Byte Software. This topic originally came from a Wikipedia article on Atomino, which has since been updated to replace Blue Byte Studio with Blue Byte Software. See also the MobyGames article here.

Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-29T02:41:42.0012Z

Yup, that's certainly true. If you're looking for stuff that's absolutely OK for commercial use, I suggest you use a MQL query to look into the license on an image, and limit it to those which have licenses that fit for your purposes (i.e. PD, CC-BY, or whatever). I can help you with that if you're unfamiliar with how to do it.

TV: TV episode performance limitation

2008-08-28T23:04:18.0000Z

Cool; we're always looking for ways to improve the search/autocomplete features, so feedback is highly appreciated. Single-word searches often return many more results than can be displayed in the 10-item list, that "Midnight" failed to come up is not surprising. In the next release, you will be able to type in "midnight doctor who" and have a very good chance that the Doctor Who episode named "Midnight" will show up.

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T22:54:42.0001Z

Ok, thank you

Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-28T22:53:19.0000Z

Thank you for looking into it! Fair use for me is a bit different than copyright free (or some CC flavor) because it would impact the commercial use possibilities.

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-28T22:47:07.0005Z

The following is the code I used. Have a look only if you're free. I print out $count to see number of topics with images and $count~438

Afterwards I grep entire query result and got numbers close to you:

692001 topics with image

626805 topics with 1 image

62827 topics with 2 images

2210 topcis with 3 images

and so on...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use URI::Escape;
# This module provides the uri_escape function used below

# Build the Metaweb query, using string manipulation
# CAUTION: the use of string manipulation here makes this script vulnerable
# to MQL injection attacks when the command-line argument includes JSON.
#$band = $ARGV[0]; # This is the band or musician whose albums are to be listed

my $cursor = 'true';
my $query;
my $pre =
'{
    "qname":{
        "cursor":';

my $post = ',
        "query":[{
            "id":null,
            "limit":1000,
            "type":"/common/topic",
            "image":[{
                "return":"count",
                "id":null
            }]
        }]
    }
}';

my $allresult = '';
my $count = 0;
my $result = '';

until($cursor =~ /error/){
#while($cursor){
    $query = $pre . $cursor . $post;

    $escaped = uri_escape($query);

    $baseurl='http://www.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread'; # Base URL for queries
    $url = $baseurl . "?queries=" . $escaped;

    $auth = 'metaweb-user=###Enter Your cookie data here###';

    #$result = `curl -s --cookie \'$auth\' $url`;
    $result = `curl -s $url`;


    $result =~ /\/api\/status\/(.*)/;
    $status = $1;

    $result =~ /cursor\":\s*(\".*\")/;
    $cursor = $1;

    $count = $count + 1;

    print $result . "\n";
}

# Use regular expressions to extract the album list from the HTTP response
#$result =~ s/^.*"album"\s*:\s*\[\s*([^\]]*)\].*$/$1/s;
#$result =~ s/[ \t]*"[ \t,]*//g;
#print $allresult ."\n";

print 'done'."\n";
# Finally, display the list of albums
#print "$result\n";
#
# vim: ts=2 sw=2

Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-28T21:26:54.0012Z

I suspect it was uploaded under the terms of fair use, but for some reason the image page doesn't say so. I'll check with the guy who uploaded it (I'm copying his user profile on this thread.)

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T20:54:28.0012Z

Go ahead and create a type in your own domain, then, as a prototype. We have generally eschewed types in the Commons that have no properties, but it is possible that your type will evolve. I would recommend that you include Structure and Location in your type.

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-28T20:34:47.0012Z

Well, I got essentially the same results as reported above using metaweb.py. Are you using your own Perl module, or one from our API library?

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T20:13:33.0012Z

I am not thinking of any new properties, I only need the list at the moment

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T19:25:00.0012Z

Take a look at Micah’s draft Performance Venue type and Robert’s draft Performance venue as well. A concert hall is a kind of performance venue; what additional properties would it need that these Performance venue types don’t have?

Music: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T17:47:05.0005Z

Cris,

we need the "Concert Hall" Type and a list of concert halls, please. There are practically hundreds of them in the world

Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-28T16:28:34.0018Z

Looks similar to the corporate stock photo, so I wanted to double-check the copyright status. Thanks!

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-28T15:19:55.0012Z

Thanks. I counted the number of iteration for the code above and multiply it by 1000 (since I set the limit 1000) to get approximate image count.

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-28T05:53:50.0012Z

Some MQL reference material can be found here. I iterated through topics with images and then recorded the number of links there were. Currently, you can't constrain the query to ask it to return topics with exactly n amount of images. I'm not sure why your results differ so greatly that mine - I'll try to investigate a little more.

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-28T05:04:39.0012Z

Thank you. It seems I don't know enough of MQL language; let me know if there's reference other than this website for I don't want to bother you like this.

I use the following code embedded in a perl code to count the number of topics with at least one image, and the result is about 438K--much lower than yours. By the way how to get the number of topics with exactly 1, 2, or 3 images? Can this be requested directly in the query?

{
"qname":{
"cursor":<cursor value>

    "query":[{
      "id":null,
      "limit":1000,
      "type":"/common/topic",
      "image":[{
        "id":null
      }]
    }]
}
}

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-28T00:07:15.0000Z

Why can't we have "Songwriter" with "Songs composed"? It makes sense and we need it

Olympic discipline: 100 metre Running Deer

2008-08-27T23:38:29.0012Z

"Olympic sport" has been renamed "Olympic discipline". They should totally bring back artistic events.

People: Type "Family" needs a property for members

2008-08-27T23:20:54.0012Z

Reciprocation from the Person type isn't necessary.

However, there's nothing linking a Person instance with a Family instance, and that link needs to be made before anything can be deduced or read off the page.

Most current instances of the Family type are royal houses or ruling dynasties, but who are the members of the House of Windsor, for example? For each family, membership may be by bloodline, or by patrilineal or matrilineal descent only. It'd be much easier to tally up the members than to try to figure them out logically.

People: Type "Family" needs a property for members

2008-08-27T22:52:29.0012Z

Should the property be reciprocated onto "person"? I'd say not, since the majority of people don't belong to families that are going to merit inclusion here. The broader question is whether this type serves any purpose -- couldn't the relevant information be gotten from parent/child/spouse/sibling values?

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-27T22:31:31.0012Z

You can just break the link between an image and a topic and not have the image deleted. Just for fun, I ran a quick analysis:

Found 716008 /common/topic topics with image links (out of ~4 million topics)
650326 have one img
63058 have two imgs
2296 have three imgs
328 have four or more imgs

Note that more than one topic can be linked to the same image.

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-27T20:54:54.0012Z

Thank you. Then if a /common/image object is not linked to any /common/topic object, why is it there and how can it be presented to end users? Thanks.

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T20:21:08.0012Z

Currently, Songwriter has no properties of its own. It is a convenience type which includes Composer (with “Works composed”) and Lyricist (with “Lyrics written”), as well as Person (with all its properties).

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T19:13:40.0012Z

Alright, I see your point. So what do we have now?

Songwriter with Songs composed and

Composer with Works composed ?

If so, then everything is fine

Film: Movie Subtitles

2008-08-27T19:07:48.0000Z

Hi Ian,

Don't be discouraged. What you are doing is very valuable. Many people speculate about U.S. copyright law though they are not experts.

I'm not an expert either, but I work in the area of subtitles and film captions, specifically for accessibity for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in the U.S. - 30 million people. (About as many people as the entire population of Canada!)

Regarding your efforts and copyright law, one of the main issues is whether you are aiming to be seeking any profit from your efforts. If you are just seeking to build up an index of film characters and quotes, you are probably within the Fair Use doctrine, and can carry on, as long as you indicate appropriate copyright notices on the material you post.

In this period of global cross-cultural communication, your work has many possible uses which would certainly fall within the Fair Use doctrine of copyright law, including making available information needed for making film/video accessible to Deaf in U.S., Deaf in non-English speaking cultures, and non-English language access to films/videos not otherwise subtitled or dubbed.

I just heard an interview with David Huynh, new guy at FreeBase.com, and it sure sounds like he is making interaces to browse and view specific data details exactly along the lines you mention.

You might check out some sites like:

mysubtitles.org

dotsub.com

good luck,

Greg
owner
DeafAccessFilms.com

Help Center: to get (image) statistics

2008-08-27T19:06:31.0012Z

No, not necessarily - a /common/image topic may not be linked to a /common/topic topic (for whatever reason). You could use the last query to find out how many images each /common/topic topic has by counting the ids in the "image" clause.

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T18:39:57.0012Z

But Billy Joel has composed classical music. So has Paul McCartney. It doesn’t make sense to shoehorn their classical compositions into a song bucket just because most of their work has been songs.

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T17:58:30.0005Z

I did not mean to separate the songs from the works "within" the same composer! I wanted to keep Billy Joel and Schubert separately!!

"Songs composed" = Billy

"Works composed" = Schubert

That's why we need both categories

Composer: Arranger

2008-08-27T17:51:09.0012Z

That's correct, thank you!

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T17:41:55.0012Z

I disagree pretty strongly. Artistic judgments, particularly judgments of quality (when does a mere song rise to the level of composition?) are so very subjective as to invite edit wars. We have the Songwriter type with which a Composer can be co-typed if appropriate. But segregating the works—are Schubert’s Lieder songs, or compositions? And what about career songwriters like Billy Joel or Paul McCartney who start writing classical compositions late in life?

Composer: Arranger

2008-08-27T17:36:16.0005Z

I just edited the Yellow River Piano Concerto. It is now credited to the arranger, but also marked as an arragnement of the Yellow River Cantata, which has its own composer.

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T17:31:22.0012Z

Hey, this is fantastic! The truth is we need BOTH. There are composers who only write songs, for them is it good to have the "Songs composed" property.

Others write all sorts of things and for them we need the "Works composed."

One should have the choice between the two alternatives, use the one which is needed and let the other one obscured

Composer: Arranger

2008-08-27T17:24:17.0012Z

That's true, so what do we do, for example when a composer takes a cantata and makes it into a PIANO CONCERTO?? I just had this problem with Xian Xinghai who wrote the Yellow River Cantata, which was transformed by a Chinese pianist into the Yellow River Piano Concerto! Who does take the credit for the new composition? I think the "arranger," but at the moment there is no way how we can credit HIM. You, as a pianist, should care about this...

big sky: webcams! weather!

2008-08-27T16:06:13.0018Z

We should have specific "webcam" and "weather" properties for sites. These should link to the URLs for these services. A flag should note if the URL is embeddable (ie, an image or a div) in a larger page.

Composer: Arranger

2008-08-27T15:04:25.0012Z

I wrestled with this for a while before deciding the other way. Sometimes it’s very clear, as Grainger’s several arrangements of his setting of “Country Gardens.” However, sometimes it’s much blurrier; the folk song “Country Gardens” existed for centuries before Grainger did his definitive scoring of it. Consider also Jimi Hendrix’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” or the notion that the 1812 Overture is an arrangement of “La Marseillaise” and the Russian national anthem. The Arrangement type makes the nature of the composition clear, but the creative rôle of the arranger is hard to limit so precisely.

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T14:59:38.0012Z

This is a good point. I’ve renamed the “Songs composed” property to “Works composed”; it already expected the Composition type but was poorly named.

Composer: Arranger

2008-08-27T06:13:40.0018Z

Some composers are good arrangers, again, one cannot mix their arrangements with their original compositions, that is a differernt category...

Composer: Works composed

2008-08-27T06:09:38.0006Z

A composer writes MORE than songs, e.g. symphonies, tone poems, chamber music, etc. There is no way one can mix these with songs together. Can we, please, have a special property for this?

Olympic discipline: 100 metre Running Deer

2008-08-27T01:23:11.0005Z

Running Deer, from the wild and wooly early almost anything goes days of the Modern Olympics (Obstacle course swimming, one armed weightlifting, tug of war, Artistic events! <1920>) was probably not a discipline per se. I am not so familiar with shooting events, started down this path when a user asked about it being missing. I'd definitely vote for renaming olympic sport.

Olympic discipline: 100 metre Running Deer

2008-08-27T00:04:31.0012Z

We actually did follow the IOC model, pretty much. The IOC has a three-tier system -- sport, discipline, and event, although not all sports have disciplines. Note that the events are listed under the disciplines. We omitted the "sport" level, it turns out. (The Freebase type "Olympic Sport" is actually used for disciplines. We should maybe consider renaming this.)

The question is, though, was "Running Deer" considered a separate discipline of Shooting? Under the current set-up, there are no separate disciplines, so air-rifle, air-pistol, pistol, rifle, and shotgun all have the same discipline of "Shooting", so I'm inclined to think that running deer was not a separate discipline, either. (Assuming that the sport/discipline distinction isn't a modern one, of course, although I wouldn't be surprised if it were.)