mheller

mheller: content encoding

2008-07-29T18:38:27.0005Z

I see, thanks a lot for the info.

mheller: content encoding

2008-07-28T19:14:21.0012Z

On further thought, I most likely copied, pasted and edited snippets from the SEP article; I added that link at the same time, as I recall.

mheller: content encoding

2008-07-28T19:06:12.0012Z

That was ages ago. I can't remember whether I copied and pasted from another site or entered the o-umlaut HTML abbreviation.

mheller: content encoding

2008-07-24T18:31:55.0044Z

Hi, you recently added some content to freebase about Kurt Godel's death. We are investigating some problems that this caused in our UI (because of non-english characters in the name) - can you help us by pointing out how you added this content (i.e. what did you do on the site?

Thanks a lot!

Michael

Internet Protocol: extra attributes

2008-06-26T08:24:36.0005Z

I think a well-known ports attribute would be useful. Possibly also a "commonly layered on top of" protocol link to eg tcp or udp.

mheller: Did you mean to enter two Colors?

2007-10-08T19:15:22.0007Z

No worries. :)

mheller: Did you mean to enter two Colors?

2007-10-06T17:22:40.0000Z

I misunderstood the "Colors" field for colleges.

mheller: Did you mean to enter two Colors?

2007-09-13T22:26:23.0005Z

Hi, I'm a little confused by your Color topic Scarlet and black. To me that's two colors, scarlet, and black, both of which we already have. Am I missing something?

WYSIWYG editor generates non-working links if http omitted from URL: a fix for this is in the works

2007-06-20T22:31:37.0011Z

hope to have it in place in the next week or so

Random failures during article updates: Thanks for posting

2007-06-20T21:32:36.0011Z

we'll take a look.

mheller: What is a patent and what you want to know

2007-05-24T14:32:18.0006Z

So you want to search on keywords in the claims that might not appear in the abstract?

mheller: What is a patent and what you want to know

2007-05-24T13:39:21.0012Z

Martin asked me to put 2 cents in. First, the definition here is from Wikopedia. NOT. It should be from the WPO or USPTO. This highlights the problem of relying on Wikopedia as anything but a starting point.There are precise legal defintions and this aint one so it heads off in the wrong direction, for example by saying "or industrially useful." Huh? Never learned that one in law school. Very misleading. Something can be industrially useful and not patentable. Second, on Martin's search structure claims are missing and all that counts in a patent is the claims. The rest is boilerplate or a way to find it via a unique identifier, (e.g. number). After claims, I would include class as that is the bundle against which a patent is evaluated. Put in a different class and it may not seem as novel or more so. Martin has that in there. Finally, be clear are you doing US only or global.

mheller: Patent References

2007-05-23T14:41:49.0006Z

That makes eminent sense, if the title qualifies the number for display purposes.

There's another interesting use case: lawyers often refer to a patent by a partial number, if it's frequently cited or critical to a given litigation. For example, I worked on this case (for Rockwell):

The suit alleges infringement of United States Patent 5,038,318 entitled “Device For Communicating Real Time Data Between A Programmable Logic Controller And A Program Operating In A Central Controller” (the ‘318 patent).

It would be useful if we could automatically generate an alias to US5038318 of '318. It would also be useful if the system recognized patent numbers with and without commas.

mheller: Patent References

2007-05-23T01:56:14.0006Z

Patent names are an interesting puzzle. In almost all cases, even in conversation, patents are referred to by number not title. Titles are not unique and are more like short descriptions. Patents only refer to other patents by number, so most lawyers you don't even know the title. All this is starting to sound like the number its the name, especially if we adopt the international convention most countries affixing a two-letter to the numbers to identify the country ie: US6309467, JP11168076-A, DE19741465-A1, EP905796-B1 etc.

What do you think about this?

mheller: Patent References

2007-05-23T00:19:44.0011Z

Regarding Patent References, I could see an that argument the reference be to the Patent, rather than the Patent Number. On the other hand, this is an unusual case, because the numbers are usually used as the names of the patent, rather than the title. I see why you did this the way you did. Another option would be to make the patent number and an alias of the name or even the name. I am not sure yet how to best solve this yet.

mheller: Added inventors

2007-05-23T00:16:43.0005Z

As requested, inventors have been added.

mheller: patents

2007-05-22T16:48:11.0006Z

Now I remember: I did implement citations. It's the References property of Patent Number.
See http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=%2Fuser%2Fmheller%2Fdefault_domain%2Fpatent_number

I have to say that I'm thinking in terms of a future application with a richer UI. A lot of this won't come across too well with the current standard Freebase interface. Look at Delphion for examples of what can be done with Patent data.

mheller: patents

2007-05-21T22:15:05.0000Z

Also, another reason for a separate Inventor type is that you can create n:m relationships between inventors and patents. Ditto for assignees. These are very valuable when you're researching a field.

EG: Search patents for "parallel computer". Look at the assignees. Aha, that's who's in the field! What other patents do those Thinking Machines guys have?

Another relationship I've been thinking is citations. Patents always reference other patents, and that's valuable.

mheller: patents

2007-05-21T22:04:44.0006Z

I buy most of the design of the /law/us_patent/ type, in principle.

Making the Inventor property of type Person is a mistake, in my opinion. Person is just too big a category for effective dropdowns. I expect to see Alexander Graham Bell in the Inventors dropdown if I type "Bell," but not St. Robert Bellarmine. That's why I created a Person/Inventor type in my private implementation.

The key to making the type useful will be to bulk load from the USPTO database, with the abstract as the description, and the USPTO full text URL as the web link.

mheller: patents

2007-05-21T17:38:12.0006Z

Seems like there may be a search bug - I could only find it by searching on 'US patent' -- which gets you here... http://www.freebase.com/view/filter?id=/law/us_patent

mheller: patents

2007-05-19T03:22:19.0021Z

I combined some elements of your definition of patent with others, and put them into the new law domain. You can find it by searching for "patent'. Let me know what you think.

7,194,614: The Patent reference link didn't appear

2007-03-25T02:42:50.0012Z

Is this a bug? Perhaps I was still altering the type at that point...

I wish there were a way to force a suggested property link to refresh.

WYSIWYG editor generates non-working links if http omitted from URL: Perhaps a third option?

2007-03-16T16:45:21.0006Z

Yes, this is how my email program handles URLs, and it feels like the right thing.

WYSIWYG editor generates non-working links if http omitted from URL: Actually, relative URLs are pretty valuable for help documentation

2007-03-16T16:44:18.0006Z

This problem bites me on other sites (Flickr and Metafilter) where I enter a "full" url but forget the http:// part, and the system turns it into a relative URL.

It would be a great help if the system attempted to do the right thing - for instance, if it sees www at the beginning, turn the string into a proper URL by prepending http:// to it. This would take care of (wild guess here) 90% of the cases.

WYSIWYG editor generates non-working links if http omitted from URL: Perhaps a third option?

2007-03-15T18:14:11.0012Z

Would it be best to make that a third option? Even better would be to auto-detect; if the URL is valid as a local reference, then by all means use it. But if it's not (like "www.example.com" or "example.com/foo") then it'd be great to automatically tidy that up for the user.

WYSIWYG editor generates non-working links if http omitted from URL: Why not subclass URLs?

2007-03-15T18:12:54.0012Z

You could have relative and absolute types of URL... Would that make things simpler, or more complicated? For that matter, you could implement as much of the URI syntax as made sense in the type system. ftp might make sense; file probably wouldn't.

In the context of the WYSIWYG editor, which is where I was focussed for the bug report, maybe a dot slash syntax could indicate a relative URL, or maybe there could be a third radio button in the dialog: internal link, absolute external link, relative link.

WYSIWYG editor generates non-working links if http omitted from URL: Actually, relative URLs are pretty valuable for help documentation

2007-03-15T06:57:46.0012Z

We use them all over the place there - and as the documents travel from www.freebase.com to sandbox.freebase.com -- it comes in pretty handy. I recognize this is the exception, but will need to figure out a way to support relative paths too... this is actually a problem with our current web page type -- only accepts absolute paths.