robert's types

Rome: Merge please

2008-09-30T13:59:50.0012Z

OK !

Rome: Merge please

2008-09-29T17:35:07.0017Z

merge, don't delete

Rome: Please don't remove types without good reason

2008-09-12T05:13:15.0017Z

Nice logic, but the reader will never know/understand these reasons for keeping apparently useless things on the page. Thank you though for explaining them to me.

Rome: Please don't remove types without good reason

2008-09-11T23:51:04.0006Z

City/town *is* working! It works to tell people that this is a city or town :)

(I will add that we try to discourage these kinds of property-less types, but there are a few in the system, and they do still have some value.)

Rome: Please don't remove types without good reason

2008-09-11T21:32:55.0012Z

No, I did not try -0753, that is a strange one!

And yes, I fully understand your arguments, it is only that I see this from the reader's point of view. A page should be informative, correct AND beautiful. Empty spaces make it look unfinished, ugly. I think that one should not add a type to a page until it is developed and working; nevertheless, I am very glad to hear that you are thinking of improving the display.Thank you

Rome: Please don't remove types without good reason

2008-09-11T21:20:54.0012Z

OK, two things here. The easy one is the dated location. I suspect you need to say "-0753" for the year. Did you try that? I know it's non-intuitive; sorry about that.

As for the empty types, it's important to remember that Freebase serves many purposes for many people. You might have heard Freebase referred to as a "semantic web" site. This means that we have a database of many, many topics, and we store information about what sorts of things those topics are. We refer to this as an "is-a" relationship, like "Rome is a city or town", or "Lorenzo Ferrero is a person". Even if we don't know anything more beyond that, it's still useful to know that something is-a something else. This information can be used in various ways. For instance, we can look at a list of cities and towns in Italy using our filter/table view.

We can also use it as part of an external web application, via our API (application programming interface). Many people have built apps on Freebase; you can see some of them by clicking "apps" in the page header on the site. One recent, very interesting app is Parallax. Here's something I built with Parallax: a map of composers born in cities or towns in Italy. This uses the city/town type as one of the creation steps, and the semantic connotation of "this is a city/town in Italy" was useful even though there are no properties on that type.

Although you don't see all these uses when you're looking a page on Freebase.com, they are all equally important to us. In fact, the contributions of people like you, who care about certain topics, can power all kinds of searches, applications, and tools across the Internet! And even partial contributions -- saying that "X is a Y" without adding any further information -- can still be useful.

I hope this helps you understand why page prettiness is not always our top priority. We certainly don't want things to be completely ugly, but there are trade-offs. That said, I believe Chris (crism) raised a bug with our UI team to ask them to make the display of empty types a little neater.

Rome: Please don't remove types without good reason

2008-09-11T04:26:40.0012Z

Good morning, Kirrily, I removed the "City/Town" and "Italian comune" types because there was nothing on them and it looks ugly to have empty spaces on the page, and "Dated location" went because it would not accept the date Apr 21 753 BC, the date when Rome was allegedly created.

Rome: Please don't remove types without good reason

2008-09-10T20:18:46.0018Z

Hi Carmen,

I notice you removed the types "Italian comune", "Dated location", and "City/town" from Rome yesterday. May I ask why? We don't usually do that unless it's incorrect -- and Rome is all those things, as far as I know!

robert: Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-29T22:17:30.0000Z

benjamin, here are two queries I threw together yesterday which might help you.

The first one gets a bunch of topics and any images associated with them, then tells you the license those images are under:

[
{
   "/common/topic/image" : [
     {
       "/common/licensed_object/license" : [],
       "id" : null,
       "name" : null
     }
   ],
   "id" : null,
   "limit" : 20,
   "name" : null,
   "type" : "/people/person"
}
]

This second one is roughly the same, but excludes licenses of a certain type -- in this case Fair Use:

[
{
   "/common/topic/image" : [
     {
       "/common/licensed_object/license" : [
         {
           "id" : null,
           "name" : null
         }
       ],
       "id" : null,
       "name" : null,
       "nofu:/common/licensed_object/license" : [
         {
           "id" : "/en/fair_use",
           "optional" : "forbidden"
         }
       ]
     }
   ],
   "id" : null,
   "limit" : 20,
   "name" : null,
   "type" : "/people/person"
}
]

robert: Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-29T20:30:04.0012Z

There are examples and documentation in the help center. If you only need to look at a couple of images, you can do it manually; the licensed pictures have a little license icon at the bottom. Unfortunately, some of the older images (like this one) were loaded before we required a license assertion for each one.

If you are loading many images at once, I would imagine that your application would require some other MQL usage anyway just to find them.

robert: Is this image copyright free?

2008-08-29T18:37:49.0012Z

Totally unfamiliar, but I do know other similar languages, so if you had an example that was close, I could disect and repurpose it. Thank you!

robert: 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.

robert: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T22:54:42.0001Z

Ok, thank you

robert: 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.

robert: 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.)

robert: 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.

robert: Concert Hall

2008-08-28T20:13:33.0012Z

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

robert: 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?

robert: 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

robert: 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!

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.

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-07-24T14:54:09.0000Z

Wikipedia tends to classify by the broadest institution, so there are a lot of actors associated with Yale University instead of the drama school. I think it's fine that we start with the lower-precision classification and as data becomes available, replace it with the more specific.

New York: Merge

2008-06-19T21:49:26.0000Z

This is New York state and the other is New York City.

Powerset: Merging these pages

2008-05-15T04:40:53.0012Z

Merge these pages... the three Powerset - Powerset, Inc. and PowerSet should be merged. They refer to the same entity

Ludwig van Beethoven: Composer vs. Musical Artist for classical composers

2008-04-26T01:20:38.0007Z

Welcome to my nightmare.

Every music database in the world indexes classical recordings by composer, basically because the physical record had to go in one place in the store. There is no reason for us to follow this model—except that our main data source, MusicBrainz, still uses it.

We will be changing this at some point, but I couldn’t tell you when. Do you have a specific use case or application that this is blocking? That would affect our priority.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Composer vs. Musical Artist for classical composers

2008-04-25T23:21:38.0012Z

It seems odd to have entries for albums and tracks recorded for a classical composer. Shouldn't the musical artist in this case be the conductor, symphony or other performers (analogous to songs and albums recorded by someone like the Rolling Stones)?

San Francisco: Merge

2008-04-18T21:01:04.0005Z

This topic has links associated with it, so it should be merged with the "official" San Francisco topic.

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-03-27T22:13:29.0017Z

Or, I suppose you could argue that everyone should be linked to the University itself, but I think that's less useful in the long run (if I'm interested in directors who went to the Yale School of Drama, I'd rather query that than to have to filter Yale Univ. grads by degree [MFA] and field of study [directing, drama, acting, etc.]).

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-03-27T22:10:34.0022Z

It does complicate queries, it's true. Ideally everyone would be linked to the school they graduated from. That said, it's useful to be able to say that someone graduated from Yale University, even if you don't know which school they attended.

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-03-27T21:26:57.0012Z

This is the case, although it complicates queries. Also, many alumni are linked to the university even though they attended Yale College.

New York: Merge

2008-03-14T19:19:17.0000Z

This still needs to be merged to other

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-02-14T23:16:00.0007Z

As near as I can tell, Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University, and should therefore be made a constituent school of Yale, along with Yale Law School, Yale School of Drama, etc., which I've now done.

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-02-14T21:56:01.0012Z

shouldn't these two be merged?

-chris

New York: Merge

2008-01-09T21:31:52.0012Z

Merge with New York, New York (id = /guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000002f8906)