typelibrarian

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-07-08T23:49:00.0000Z

I've done this, but without separating the fictional topics from the real-world topics: http://www.freebase.com/tools/schema/fictional_universe/school_in_fiction.

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-07-01T05:36:32.0000Z

I would prefer that the fictional topic be seperate from the real-world topic. i.e. University of Cambridge in the James Bond Universe be a seperate topic from the real University of Cambridge.
Perhaps 'educational institution in fiction' could have a 'based upon' property to link the fictional and real-world topics?

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-06-30T19:42:21.0012Z

An "educational institution in fiction" type could work -- we've used that locution a few times for types that can have both fictional and real-world instances.

Fictional Character: Education?

2008-06-28T13:47:06.0005Z

Could we have some way of linking in the educational background of a character? i.e. an education property.

My first thought was that we would need a 'Fictional Educational Institution' type, but that would not cover characters who were educated at real world institutions. e.g. James Bond at the University of Cambridge.

I think we therefore need an 'educational institution for fictional characters' type for the property.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-25T01:11:05.0001Z

Well ok then.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T22:57:06.0005Z

Ed asks, “Aren’t board members always members?” Not at all. It is common, especially with non-profits, to ask outsiders to sit on a board to assure some independent perspective.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T22:18:38.0012Z

I also agree that this would be useful. I thought I made a similar suggestion a couple months ago but could not find it. Part of this suggestion was that "Board members" and other structured classes of membership should be co-typed as "Member". For example, Organization_board_member is linked as a property of Organization but is not linked to "Member" in any way. Aren't board members always members?

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T21:28:10.0000Z

Seems like a reasonable property to me.

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-24T20:27:32.0012Z

I think there is. Since membership is a mediated property, the "grade" of membership would hang off the "organization membership" type. There could be a "class" property that links to an instance of a "membership class" instance, for which we would have to create this new type. Comments?

Organization member: Grade of Membership?

2008-06-23T12:56:47.0012Z

A large number of organizations have varying grade of memberships and associations available for it's members. For an example see Institute of Structural Engineers.

This matters greatly in the type of organisation where the difference between being a Chartered member or not has legal implications in the work of the member.

Is there a way to incorporate this into the schema?

Play: I think plays should have something like 'Subjects'

2008-05-15T19:15:15.0007Z

The type "Written Work" has a property "Subjects", so I'd suggest that "Written Work" be added as an Included Type of "Play". I'm surprised it isn't already.

Play: I think plays should have something like 'Subjects'

2008-05-15T19:14:12.0000Z

Plays should probably be co-typed as written works to get the subject property. Actually, I had originally intended to refactor them into written work when we refactored the publishing domain, but I seem to have omitted it.

Play: I think plays should have something like 'Subjects'

2008-05-15T18:57:07.0012Z

An example is "Alma" which is based on a famous Austrian woman Alma Mahler-Werfel and would could have as a subjects:

Biography, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Sanitorium ?

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-07T01:53:05.0007Z

Neil Patrick Harris plays himself in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. We could model that as him playing a fictional character named Neil Patrick Harris, who is in turn based on the actor… but “As Himself” is a well-established convention.

On the other hand, when Neil Patrick Harris is on The Tonight Show, he is making a personal appearance, not playing himself.

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-07T00:18:56.0007Z

I wonder if these roles can't just be part of film performance, already it has Himself/Herself (which I am not sure if there is a good distinction between itself and the default Personal Appearance role type).

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-06T23:37:20.0007Z

That is weird. I can't remember our rationale, except that it probably involved the thought that "film appearances" is either too rare a property to put on "person" or would be too confusing, and that we hadn't thought of a good co-type. The personal TV appearance type probably has a similar problem. Suggestions for resolving this would be welcome.

Personal film appearance: As it is, this compound value type seems of little importance

2008-05-06T23:17:22.0005Z

As currently designed, a Personal Film appearence doesn't appear on the person topic and only appears on the film topic (Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth is a classic example, the only film appearance currently is for a Futurama show).

I've even at times forgotten its there when entering data (THX-1138 documentary springs to mind as a recent example I need to now correct all the acting performances to personal appearances).

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2008-04-29T23:55:30.0000Z

Well there is somthing like that by user duck1123

Should it be a topic-based property or simply a text-based propert (there are some topics existing for some of the more well-known alter-IDs).

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2008-04-29T23:19:45.0007Z

How about an alter-ego property? This would come in handy for superheroes. Seems that this is being stuck on as an alias right now, but there are enough superheroes that it might as well be a property, right?

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T17:52:50.0000Z

Not sure what advice you want; just post it again wherever you initially meant to. (Perhaps on the Dissertation topic, which is actually called Thesis?) BTW, you can add links to posts; no need to just list the URL in text.

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T15:53:43.0007Z

But I posted that in the wrong place! Please advise, thanks, jf

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T15:52:37.0012Z

There's life after your dissertation, even if that's hard to believe. Writing's as much manual labor as mental, as much about rituals of time and space and resonance as about methods, and about knowing that our fingers can lead our minds to new places, fresh ideas and implications. But dissertations are often hell, a kind of writing you'll never do again: they're lonelier experiences, riskier, longer and slower pushes uphill than most other writing you'll ever do. At least that's some of what's in the essay, "Notes on Academic Writing," that I wrote years ago to avoid writing a conference paper—and I've found that this essay has had an underground existence ever since, being passed along from one dissertation writer to another delighted to see that someone else was as miserable as they were and went on, nevertheless, to publish a good deal of material and not perish after all. That essay can be found at: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/jff1/learningacadwrtg.htm

Still, I do wish someone had shown me John Trimble's wonderful Writing with Style!

Theater Character: Add Fictional Character as an included type

2008-04-24T23:13:38.0007Z

That would seem to make sense, yes. Consider it done.

Theater Character: Add Fictional Character as an included type

2008-04-24T18:56:20.0005Z

Shouldn't Fictional Character be an included type of Theater Character?

Dissertation: Fields of study aren't dissertations

2008-04-11T19:20:55.0019Z

We should probably take a closer look at the property names of the very complex education CVT. Users see that someone has a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Chemistry, and so they enter the dissertation as Chemistry, rather than Chemistry being the field or major, and Interactions of nonorganic sulfur with dihydrogen monoxide or what have you for the dissertation.

Dissertation: Fields of study aren't dissertations

2008-04-11T19:16:45.0005Z

... are they? How come "Chemistry" and the like are typed as dissertation?

Fictional Universe: Created by?

2008-04-07T21:28:19.0007Z

Go wild. I've added the property and a new type, "fictional universe creator".

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-07T21:24:59.0007Z

Manga makes my head hurt. But I'd tend to agree that a value for "current number of issues" is not particularly valuable since, for active manga, the number is going to change all the time.

A manga/comic book/publishing reconciliation is probably in order. (Shudder!)

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-07T21:11:46.0000Z

I think, if I recall correctly, the original thought was that it was the number of volumes as of that moment. Basically, I was copying the wikipedia infobox since the goal was to load that data in. This whole schema probably needs refactoring to capture diferent releases of manga and the whole published work refactoring.

Your thoughts Jeff?

Fictional Universe: Created by?

2008-04-07T15:16:24.0012Z

+1 on this request ... I was playing around with the Dune Universe, and I thought it strange that we could not enter Frank Herbert as the creator of the fictional universe.

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-05T08:17:11.0007Z

I'd humbly suggest trying to model what you are looking for on sandbox, our testing area for our users and ourselves. Then creating it here on Freebase within a personal domain. You can easily use it in conjunction with what exists already in the Manga/Anime public domain.

As I said, I am unsure what was being modeled/attempted here. Remember we are still an Alpha-site and thus domains/types are still under development..,By us but more importantly, by you, community members.

We'll happily answer any questions, better yet, try one of our mail lists for even broader help/responses from a good number of fellow data-modeling enthusiasts (and admins as well).

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-04T20:42:51.0045Z

Well, that's not an unreasonable way to do it, but the situation is more complicated, since releases in different countries will sometimes have different numbers of volumes, re-releases do happen with either the same of different number of volumes, etc.

I'm just not sure that a simple dated integer is really going to capture any worthwhile information, or precisely what information it should capture.

It seems to me that it would be better/more accurate to create items for each published volume, and link them in. But that doesn't look to be possible... am I missing something?

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-04T19:29:00.0024Z

Eh...Fruits basket ended on Nov 2006, so 23 for the year 2006.

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-04T19:21:52.0005Z

I guess I don't understand the unique system of manga publications all that well (I like to watch...). I am not the administrator and there is no description/help (hint hint!)

So I do know that manga titles tend to first appear as part of a monthly/semi-yearly magazine publication schedule as chapters. The chapters are released as manga title containing usually one volume. Usually several volumes are published each year until the end of run of the manga.

So this property could be capturing how many titles at the specific time.

So for Fruits Basket there would be 23 volumes as of this date, April 2008? There will be more so it could be 25/26 volumes as of April 2009.

---

For finished manga there could be re-publication in different sets of books, maybe combining several volumes into one book, thus a reduced number of titles, at a later date than the original run.

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All guesses on my part I'm afraid.

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-04T00:44:51.0007Z

If it should just contain a unique number, then is should it also not be changed from dated integer to just integer (since the date doesn't seem helpful, then).

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-03T23:36:07.0000Z

I believe it probably should be a unique number and thata it accepts multiple values is simply an oversight.

Manga Title: Number of volumes

2008-04-02T17:39:25.0012Z

I'm a little confused about this. Am I meant to enter the current number of volumes published, together with the current date? The field accepts multiple values, so should it contain a history of when volumes were published?

If it's the former, is that intended to show that the information may be out of date? If the latter, why not just create items for each volume and link to those, rather than merely offering the number of them?

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T22:06:35.0007Z

(Sorry, meant to link to the other thread on historical persons.)

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T22:05:30.0007Z

In this thread, they even have the same problem for real historical persons: "Take "Person": where their dates of birth and death are not known, the dates in which a person flourished is standardly used to disambiguate them." They want to specify the birth date as "Qing Dynasty". This will probably be solved by splitting out a separate type (like Living Thing) that defines Birth Date and which the Person type includes. (Then you could mix in a different type that defines the different kind of birth date that you need.) The relevance to "contextual assertions" still applies. If you have a type for real Living Thing (with a birth date), will a user be afraid to use it on a fictional character? Right now, they should be afaid because it implies the character is real like all the other topics with the property. But the problem is solved if the character uses the same type as real things, but asserts the birth date in the context of the fictional universe (so it doesn't come up ono searches for "real people born on this date").

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T21:39:13.0007Z

I don't think this example would actually be solved by assertions, since regardless of whether we implement assertions or not, we still need a type to hold the data, and we currently lack a type that could be used for both real dates and dates in fictional calendar systems. It does seem like people want to enter this data for fictional characters, so it's worth trying to model a type we can use. A compound-value type with two properties might suffice -- one of type "datetime" for fictional characters in universes using the Gregorian calendar (AND who are born within the range 10,000 BCE - AD 9999), and one or two for all others. I have a bazillion things on my plate right now, but if I have time, I'll play around with it.

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T20:10:11.0000Z

This came up on a couple Fictional Character topics where someone wanted to give a birth date so they had to make the character a Person too, which is a no-no. To beat the same drum again: This problem is solved by allowing users to use the existing types for Person, Education, Politician, Author, etc. etc. on a fictional character - just put the assertion for the bithdate or "term of office as president" in the context of the fictional universe. In everyday life, people put properties, not only on topics, but on assertions. Quotation: "President Bush says there are WMDs but the French prime minister says there are not". Citation: "According to the US Census, the population is 100,000". Fictional assertions about real things "In the universe the 'Independence Day' movie, the Empire State Building is destroyed on July 2, 1996". (Wouldn't it be great to put this assertion on the real Empire State Building topic without having to create a separate type for 'Fictional Building' when we have to make a separate topic?)

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T18:50:51.0007Z

The problem here is that lots of fictional characters exist in universes that don't use the Gregorian calendar, so we'd need to find a way to capture Gregorian dates, Stardates, Middle-Earth dates, years A.F. (After Ford), etc.

Fictional Character: Add property: Date of Birth

2007-08-09T04:47:17.0004Z

Can you add a Date of Birth property (and maybe Date of Death too)?

Fictional Universe: Created by?

2007-07-11T17:50:54.0007Z

I agree - we need to be able to specify the creator(s) of a fictional universe separately from the creator(s) of characters in that universe. Doctor Who is another good example. Hmm...Fictional Entity Creator? That would apply to fictional objects as well.

Fictional Universe: Created by?

2007-07-11T17:39:30.0000Z

We could certainly add this type; we'd probably want to reuse "fictional character creator" and rename the type to allow for them to have created other fictional things as well. Anybody have suggestions for a good name here? We won't, however, be able to reliably derive the creator of a fictional character from the creator of the universe, since a lot of fictional universes include works written by a variety of people, some of whom, at least, will have created characters not imagined by the universe's originator. Star Trek is maybe the best example of this -- Gene Roddenberry created the universe and probably most of the main characters from at least the first two series, but new spin-off series and films keep being created after his death.

Fictional Universe: Created by?

2007-07-11T00:14:43.0004Z

Should this type have "Created by" as a Property? Ultimately it would be great if a Fictional Character that appears in a Fictional Universe could have its creator derived from the creator of the fictional universe ... e.g. Frodo Baggins appears in Middle-earth, and therefore automatically the Character Created By field is filled in as J R R Tolkien ...