sgmils

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T16:22:47.0012Z

Well, I guess it depends on what we want to use it for. Do we want to use generic terms for multiple legal types, or do we want to be more specific.

For example, PLC is Public Limited Company. "Public limited company" could be used to cover all those types in various countries, or it could be for the specific Plc used in UK.

But unless you are intimately aware of what SA (Societe Anonyme) is, or use the Wiki page to see what approximate equiv is, then chances are no one is going to use this field (at least for "harder" ones). I deal with company names all the time, so I'm familiar with Oyj, AG, KgaA, etc, but I don't know what they translate to.

Either way we're missing values. If we keep the "generic" route, then we (I) should comb through the wiki page and identify the big ones we're missing, like "Limited Partnership with Shares" (for SCA & KgaA, for example). Though I'm not sure if all can be mapped (like KK, which is common in Japan, though I think it is usually seen as Co Ltd).

So I think we need to figure out what direction we want to take, generic or country specific, and I don't think either is an easy answer (either you have a long list of specifics or a hard to determine list of generics).

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T15:20:31.0012Z

Enumerated types like Company Type aren’t locked, they’re just a little harder to add to, in order to discourage accidental proliferation. Additions must be made through the query editor or some other way that isn’t the client. We do encourage you to discuss the proposed additions with the community first, though, to avoid edit wars on high-profile types. What specific instances do you think are conspicuously missing?

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T14:00:35.0017Z

Why is Company Type locked? There are many legal structures of companies, and even state-owned enterprises. But very few are listed here. Is there a particular reason for this? If so, it would be good to have that documented so those of us filling in company information know how ot complete this field. Thanks

Pierpoint Morgan Library: marked for merge

2008-08-29T07:40:50.0017Z

As of now there is no info in this topic. All moved to Morgan Library.

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.

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-28T20:45:44.0012Z

Ah, crap, I forgot to do that last night. So easily distracted :)

Thanks!

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-28T17:27:02.0000Z

I've flagged them for merge, and added Metallgesellchaft as a former name of GEA Group.

Commentary on Palestine Peace Not Apartheid: Book topic already exists

2008-08-28T14:48:16.0017Z

This is not a topic and the structured information is already on the equivalent book topic Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-28T01:41:08.0012Z

yeah, you're right. I guess I thought maybe there was a reason wiki had a separate topic for it, not being intimately familiar with the history. But based on the website it does seem like they should be the same topic.

The Linde Group: Linde Group & Linde AG

2008-08-27T21:12:02.0017Z

These two topics are for the same company (legal name is Linde AG). The wiki for Linde AG now redirects to the Linde Group topic.

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-27T20:37:51.0012Z

Company histories give me the biggest headache! According to their history, though, Metallgesellschaft acquired (the original) GEA in 1999, changed its name to MB Technologies in 2000, and then changed its name again to GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft. So arguably, these two topics are really about the same company, and should be merged.

Metallgesellschaft: Note

2008-08-27T20:21:25.0005Z

Metallgesellschaft doesn't exactly exist anymore and so the parent isn't technically GEA Group, but I put that in there so we can see the linkage of the two companies (see history here: http://www.geagroup.com/en/unternehmen/chronik.html).

SABIC Innovative Plastics: Don't Merge with SABIC

2008-08-26T14:41:03.0010Z

SABIC Innovative Plastics is a business unit of SABIC: http://www.sabic-ip.com/gep/en/NewsRoom/FactSheet/fact_sheet.html

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.

Protected Places: Some protected area databases

2008-08-24T16:52:43.0012Z

The Jamaica Protected Areas Trust is creating a web site with interactive virtual tour maps linking to protected area location 360 degree panorama views with audio, detailed information, and a Conservation Network Center for public involvement.

The web site also contains a link to comprehensive GIS datasets on Jamaica. See The Nature Conservancy Internet Map Services.

Lotus Cars: discussion about opel speedster

2008-08-22T05:44:54.0018Z

this is a discussion about the opel speedster.

all elises are slower..

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.

Bayer Industry Services: Renamed Currenta

2008-08-21T19:49:15.0017Z

Looks like Bayer Industry Services was renamed to Currenta on Jan 1 2008.

Periodical Publication Date: Issue as machine readable text?

2008-08-21T18:09:07.0005Z

Well this thread got completely lost. I'm going to see about actually getting this done 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.

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-20T22:00:22.0012Z

Take a look here: https://www.freebase.com/view/user/jeff/newspaper and see what you think. I've filled out the San Francisco Chronicle with data in both old and new formats for comparison.

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-16T10:49:17.0005Z

I would like all of the readers to please contribute in your comments whether President Musharraf should resign or should he be punished for his deeds and acts and thrown away from his position.

Please comment what and why ???

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-08T17:27:45.0000Z

It could also address local vs. national editions (like the NY Times), which might be interesting to some people. I'll add a task for myself in the old refactoring queue.

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T23:47:38.0012Z

I was thinking something like that, where we combined the fields into one.

And I had no idea there were papers that still did morning/evening editions!

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T22:59:52.0012Z

That would also help modeling papers with morning and evening editions (the Providence Journal-Bulletin had this until very recently).

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T18:54:35.0012Z

Good point. The issue then is how to model things like price and circulation in a way that accomodates weekly papers as well as those that have both daily and sunday editions. We could do a CVT with value, date, and frequency (or maybe call it edition?). Papers with only one edition could optionally leave frequency blank, I suppose. Any other thoughts?

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-06T18:15:37.0010Z

Can we remove the "daily" specific nature of the Newspaper Type so we can use this for weeklies?

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-08-02T03:21:05.0000Z

After further investigation, it transpires that the NAICS and SIC classifications were added to /business/industry some time ago. So we plan to deprecate industry_classification. All the same info is available in the other type. I have moved the few current uses of specific industry classifications over to their corresponding industry and plan to retire the type altogether since its no longer in use.

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T19:20:15.0012Z

ooh, I think that works! I like how you have the options of indicating whether or not it was acquired, etc (which happens a lot). Thanks, Jeff

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T18:24:18.0012Z

Take a peek over on sandbox: I just posted a proposed modification to the company schema to handle divisions on sandbox. See https://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/remington_rand for an example (example expires Monday!).

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T15:42:35.0017Z

Seeing the Calvin Klein Underwear topic with the type of Company attached to it, made me wonder how we want to handle divisions and brands.

I believe the intent for the Company schema is to flag legal companies, like Calvin Klein Inc or General Dynamics Corp. So parent companies and their subsidiaries. If correct, then divisions and brands would not be assigned to the Company type.

If so, then we may need a way to flag topics as a division (or perhaps we do this somehow in the Company schema). Same with brands, which are not always separated from the parent company.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-08-01T06:49:59.0000Z

I think this is correct, that the generic product is not represented well by the NAICS codes. For example the closest you get to 'Petroleum' in the NAICS tree is:

Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing   324
    Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing   3241
        Petroleum Refineries
        Asphalt Paving, Roofing, and Saturated Materials Manufacturing
        Other Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing
             ... all the way down to
                   Petroleum Refineries 324110

Which is clearly not what you want. I do think though that the classification of companies is going to have to come in two flavours, the topic based /business/company/industry and a different property linking to the NAICS (and hence SIC and other codes that map to that same classification).

It would be very hard to merge the industry tree with the NAICS tree without creating new things that had no NAICS codes.

On the topic of NACE, SIC equivalences etc, the plan would be to load them all.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-31T22:11:28.0012Z

Import/export actually expects "industry", which is more general than "industrial classification". Instances of the industry include things like Computers, Consumer electronics, and Petroleum, which are values I would expect to see as imports and exports. I think this is the advantage of keeping the two types separate -- they have slightly different semantics which are useful in different contexts.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-31T16:25:26.0012Z

I'm not sure where to begin on this one.

It is not odd to have more than just NAICS, which is North America specific. NACE is used in the EU, and some countries even have their own classification (like France, the NAF).

And I know D&B still widely uses SIC Code, even though it has been replaced.

I am not familiar with all the codes in the type, but we should research first before removing any, to make sure we're not making the fields North America specific, or if the codes are standard for some reason that is not readily obvious.

As for Industry vs Industrial Classification, I know when I was filling in the Export/Import information in countries, using the CIA World Factbook as a guide, it was difficult or impossible to fill certain values in. You can't export "Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing", instead you export the actual product. So not sure if that means the export/import fields need to be changed or we need another field/category for the industrial classification (less doable)? Or we just live with non-intuitive values in the import/export fields??

Business: New properties

2008-07-30T08:41:14.0005Z

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Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-30T08:36:47.0012Z

agree above guys

from http://english.51766.com by lisa

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T21:30:32.0012Z

Thanks !

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T20:33:59.0012Z

For a start, see the help topic Entering Scholarly Works and Citations. The short answer is that an article should have the types Scholarly Work, Written Work, and Published Work. Between these, you should be able to enter most of the properties you mention.

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T19:57:22.0017Z

An article in pubmed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ) can be defined by a journal (issn, abbreviation, title) , an issue ( volume, issue, date ) , a title, a pubmed identidier (pmid) , a doi , a list of authors. I'm lost in all those types. Dear Lazyweb, hat are the types that should be used to create a new instance of an article ?

Thanks

Pierre

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-07-24T23:20:13.0005Z

Spurred on by an aside that spatialed made in some discussion post awhile back (I can't locate the post), I'm considering revising the way that we model journal issues. Currently, each issue has its own topic, which links to both the journal and the articles contained in that issue. (See
http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/book/journal_issue) The main problems with this format are that it is cumbersome to enter data, and also that most bibliographic sources are concerned primarily with the article and the journal, relegating the issue to a series of strings (volume, issue, date). This latter issue might make integration with standard bibliographic schemas a bit cumbersome, although it wouldn't be insurmountable.

As an experiment, though, I thought I'd try to see what a model that eliminated the issue type entirely looked like. Here are the results:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008cd1edd.

I've replaced the issue type with a CVT that connects the article and the journal, and includes the standard bibliographic data of Volume, issue, date, issue date extra, and pages ("issue date extra" is something I had to make up for journals that aren't published on a schedule that translates into mm/dd/yyyy). Journal articles have both Scholarly Work and Written Work as included types, although a journal article can also be a review, editorial, letter or other type of writing.

The only real disadvantage that I see to this is that constructing the contents of a given issue will be harder -- users will have to query on a combination of several fields (volume, issue, etc.) to find what they're looking for.

I'd love to hear what people think about this. If it seems to work, I might do the same thing for newspaper issues.

This is also being discussed on the data-modelers mailing list: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/2008-July/000989.html

Publishing: "Genre" as properties of "Book" and "Short Story"

2008-07-22T18:35:33.0007Z

I think that about covers it.

Publishing: "Genre" as properties of "Book" and "Short Story"

2008-07-21T19:57:15.0007Z

It does seem silly that some short stories have "short story" as a genre. Feel free to delete those assertions. Poems have genres, but those are pretty much already handled by the "verse form" propety. Plays have their own genre type. What other types of written works do you think have genres (that aren't already covered by an existing type)?

Publishing: "Genre" as properties of "Book" and "Short Story"

2008-07-17T01:04:29.0012Z

I'm curious why "Genre" is not a property of the type "Written Work" but exists separately under both "Book" and "Short Story" (though not "Poem").

It seems silly that some short stories have the genre of "Short Story", which would make more sense if tagged on the more generic "Written Work" instead.

Business: New properties

2008-06-24T19:22:41.0012Z

A suggestion is to add an "End date" property to the Company_name_change type.

Business: New properties

2008-06-24T18:31:10.0012Z

Part of the idea behind topics in Freebase is that there should be only one topic for any given "thing". If a company just changes its name, it doesn't necessarily become a different entity, any more than when a person changes their name.

Business: New properties

2008-06-23T10:54:37.0000Z

I would rather that each different company name be a different topic.
The company type would have 'name changed from' and 'name changed to' properties.

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.

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.