Publishing

Poem: Poem vs. Written Work

2008-05-05T21:10:37.0007Z

No, we probably don't need the "poet" type, now that you mention it.

Poem: Poem vs. Written Work

2008-05-05T20:36:51.0007Z

Not to gang up on you, but it does bother me that the Poet type is pretty much an empty label, tagging an author as a poet. Do we need such a data-barren label? Why not just do away with it altogether?

The singular "Poetic School or Movement" property could be easily merged into a more general "Literary School or Movement" that would hang off of the Author type. That a person can be labeled as a Poet could be entered in the Profession property of the Person type, if at all.

Poem: Poem vs. Written Work

2008-05-05T19:51:06.0000Z

Thanks for the replies. Unfortuantely, I don't have too much time to deal with the intricacies of data modeling, but I do like to throw my hat in the ring now and then.

It's quite interesting, however, to dive in deeper and see some of the complexities that you're dealing with. I'll keep adding data whenever I can =)

Poem: Poem vs. Written Work

2008-05-05T18:58:16.0007Z

I'd add, to Faye's excellent explanation, that the documentation might be a bit out of synch with the current model -- we're in the middle of refactoring this domain, and I wanted to hold off redocumenting until the schema was stable. I hope to fix this soon!

With regards to the question that Faye fobbed off on me (as a domain admin, that is), the reason that "poem" doesn't link directly to "poet" is because to do so would create a denormalization -- people would have to enter the poet both in the poem type and written work type. "Written work" contains properties, including author, that are common to all kinds of written works, making it more consistent to query and enter.

What conflicts do you see between written work, published work, and poem? I've tried to make these complementary, but if I've missed something, I'd like to know so I can fix it.

Financial support provider: Suggestion: generalize and reciprocate with supported projects

2008-05-05T18:04:33.0005Z

Can we generalize this type to include any financial support provider and attribute it with a list of reciprocated support types. Some properties could include Supported research projects, Supported programs, Supported organizations, ...

Poem: Poem vs. Written Work

2008-05-02T02:00:42.0007Z

Hi Mark,

I think my reply to your other post is relevant here as well. Published Work and Written Work are included types of Poem (meaning a new poem topic you create will automatically be typed Published Work and Written Work as well), because we find that relationship to be generally true.

Authorship is a basic shared property of all Written Work: be it a Poem, Short Story, Short Non-fiction, or Review. It's not a conflicting relationship, but an inclusive relationship. The fact that there's no direct link between a Poem and a Poet is unfortunate, but I'll leave that to be answered by an admin in this domain.

The publishing domain is one of the more complex (and well thought out) domains in Freebase. I suggest taking a look at the list of help documents at the top of the domain page. They go through how to enter different types of data in detail. It may sound straight-forward, until you realize the data model allows you to input a collection of translated excerpts of non-fiction work in a periodical -- that kind of data modeling requires some complexity, which unfortunately does make the simple case a little more complex as well.

Oh, one more thing. Bear in mind that there's heavy refactoring work going on here, so what you see is not necessarily what will be.

Poem: Poem vs. Written Work

2008-05-02T01:04:58.0012Z

Poem doesn't have an author? This seems weird to me; and shouldn't it be a type of written work? There seems to be some weird conflicts between Poem, Published Work, and Written Work

Written Work: Online versions vs. Weblinks

2008-04-29T16:24:26.0000Z

Perhaps some, but probably not too much. Part of the idea behind having distinct properties for some types of links is to allow users/the API to distinguish between miscellaneous links and links with some specific meaning/value/purpose. In the UI, all links are actually entered and displayed in the "weblinks" box. The association with the property is made in the "type" menu when you enter a link.

Written Work: Online versions vs. Weblinks

2008-04-29T04:16:18.0012Z

Seems like you will get redundancy between these two fields. Thoughts?

Publishing: Plans for scraping publishing data?

2008-04-28T18:43:59.0007Z

I agree about that! I can tell you that we don't have any current plans to import written works in bulk other than books, book editions, and possibly academic publications, so poems, essays, stories, etc. that aren't in Wikipedia will definitely be needed. And, for topics we got from Wikipedia, anything that's not in an infobox or implied by a category, will probably not be extracted in the near future. (By "implied by a category", i mean that a category like "Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle implies information about the author, the series, and one of the characters.)

Publishing: Plans for scraping publishing data?

2008-04-28T18:30:20.0000Z

Thanks Jeff! It's interesting to know what the plans are for these data loads. It's more satisfying to fill in data if you feel like all/most of the work that could have been done by a bot is already finished.

Publishing: Plans for scraping publishing data?

2008-04-28T18:13:16.0007Z

We were waiting until the publishing schemata stabilized before going after large amounts of data. We're mostly done mucking about with it now, so we're going to start doing more with this. In terms of getting Wikipedia data typed correctly, we have some bots that look at categories and infobox templates which should type more of the essays, stories, poems, books, etc. that are in Wikipedia, and in some cases be able to associate them with authors.

We can't get Amazon or WorldCat data, because Amazon and OCLC don't have licenses compatible with CC-BY, alas. We do have some data from ISBNDB, which we're working on reconciling and loading.

Publishing: Plans for scraping publishing data?

2008-04-28T17:47:09.0012Z

A quick search for "an essay by" on Wikipedia.org gives 800 results compared to the 96 pieces of short non-fiction on Freebase:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=KjC&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22an+essay+by%22&btnG=Search

More generally, what are the plans to fill in publishing data? Can Freebase scrape Amazon or WorldCat data ( http://www.worldcat.org/ )?

Book: Book Titles in other languages

2008-04-10T21:08:57.0007Z

freevase? I mean freebase. ;)

Book: Book Titles in other languages

2008-04-10T21:08:34.0007Z

I'm afraid that currently, there is no good answer on how we should name books (and such) with non-english titles. There's been discussion around this issue - see the data-model list for the thread.

Unfortunately, that also does not answer your question at hand. Aliases show up in autocomplete, so you can input either the original language title or english title as the alias and it will show up in autocomplete.

Also, you can check out this excellent blog post about freevase and internationalization by crism.

Book: Book Titles in other languages

2008-04-10T20:13:59.0000Z

This is fairly common problem, unfortunately. This was discussed on the Freebase data-modeling mailing list a little while ago, starting with this message.

More generally, this post on the Freebase blog discusses some of the ways internationalization is (and isn't) handled in Freebase.

In the short term, I'd recommend using the English title (when there is one) as the main title, and entering the original-language title as an alias. (If you're entering book editions, however, you should always enter the title as it appears on the book, no matter what language it's in.)

If you're feeling enterprising, and don't mind mucking about in MQL, you can try to insert the title in Spanish, following the examples in the blog post.

Book: Book Titles in other languages

2008-04-10T18:53:09.0000Z

Yeap, i have the same problem with Vargas Llosa.

Publishing: Different type for collections of poetry, short stories, essays, etc.

2007-12-22T07:50:28.0007Z

You might want to check out the Published work type and the Short story type. Also, there is a Help Center topic on Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical.

Publishing: Different type for collections of poetry, short stories, essays, etc.

2007-12-22T04:38:09.0007Z

Has there been any resolution on this? There are some books which are really just collections of short stories that I'd like to enter.

Reviewer: Reviewer as Author

2007-12-19T21:21:38.0000Z

I agree that peer-reviewer is more of an editor than an author. A peer-reviewer does not create content but critiques someone else's work (not that I'm trying to make it sound bad...). ;)

Reviewer: Reviewer as Author

2007-12-19T21:07:21.0007Z

I saw that. It looks good! I did not realize that this type was getting rolled into authorship during that refactoring. It looked to me like it would be linked instead.

I agree that peer-reviewer should be a different type than other reviewers but I was thinking of going about it another way where peer-reviewer is a type of editor. They are not really authors. Also, the reviewer described in this discussion topic is an author of a type of published work (i.e., review).

Reviewer: Reviewer as Author

2007-12-19T19:19:55.0007Z

Heh. I meant to say that "I posted a set of proposed changes to the data-modeling and developers mailing lists last week".

Reviewer: Reviewer as Author

2007-12-19T18:52:32.0007Z

I posted a set of proposed changes to the publishing domain that might include this change last week (among other things, I want to roll most of the types that are similar to author together). My proposed schema has been subsequently wiped from sandbox, so it's not visible now. I'm hoping to make some adjustments to it and re-post it today (if not, it might have to wait until after the holidays). I'd recommend creating a new type for peer-reviewers, though. Partly because we'll want to be able to migrate the data cleanly to the new types (rather than having to sort out which person is what kind of reviewer), and partly because peer-reviewer would presumably link directly to the work reviewed, rather than to a published review.

Reviewer: Reviewer as Author

2007-12-19T06:39:00.0005Z

I suggest that this type should be merged with author. All the people here are authors and their published works are only different in that they are summaries of original works. The type may be better used to represent people who review works through peer-review or similar process. That's how I wanted to use it anyway. To capture the information currently included in this type you could add a Boolean property of "Original source?", or something similar, to the Published work type.

Periodical Publication Date: Issue as machine readable text?

2007-12-18T00:55:04.0007Z

Changing the expected type of "issue number" is a good idea. I'll have to check out how much data needs to be migrated, and find out if changing the type will break any applications, but I think it should be pretty straight-forward.

I've moved the "additional date info" down; it won't display as well (e.g., "Summer 2007" will now display as "2007 Summer") but I think you're right that this is less annoying than having it appear first for data entry.

Periodical Publication Date: Issue as machine readable text?

2007-12-14T09:21:49.0005Z

I know this will have pretty big consequences, but would it be possible to change Issue from Integer to Machine readable text? The reason I ask is because some publication volumes contain multiple issues (e.g., "1-2"). This seems silly to me but they do it. Also, there are probably some cases where Issue is a character (e.g., i, A). The Additional date info property could be used to store this information but it doesn't really seem appropriate to do so - it refers to date.

Another thing, would you mind moving the Additional date info to the bottom of the list of User Created Properties? It is probably less often used than the other properties and it typically refers to a subset of the Date property.

Published Work: Horizontal list?

2007-12-11T17:15:56.0007Z

I think a horizontal list would make the information harder parse when there are multiple publications. This may all become moot soon anyway, since there's going to be a major redesign of the UI fairly soon, and I'm not sure how the horizontal/vertical lists will appear.

Published Work: Horizontal list?

2007-12-11T08:51:06.0000Z

The horizontal list is presented with a smaller font and grouped tighter than the vertical list. Depending on how much information is on a page, this type tends to get pushed off the page in a vertical list so that I must scroll to see it. Changing the order of objects in the list would not really solve this problem for me. I'm pretty new to how everything is organized here so maybe I'm missing something but a horizontal list seems like it would solve my problem.

Published Work: Horizontal list?

2007-12-11T06:44:53.0000Z

Why? I mean, the type admins may well consider it, but I was wondering what reason you had for asking.

Published Work: Horizontal list?

2007-12-11T05:17:26.0012Z

Would you mind setting the "published in/published as" property as a horizontal list?

Short Non-fiction: Issues

2007-12-10T18:23:43.0000Z

Thanks Jeff. I'm still trying to figure out how everything is organized. I now see that I could have found this information by searching for "journal" in the help topics.

Short Non-fiction: Issues

2007-12-10T18:09:59.0000Z

Works of short non-fiction themselves don't typically have ISBNs or issues. These properties are contained on the types for the object(s) they were published in (typically book editions or periodical issues). The way to record places of publication is via the property "published in/published as" (this property is actually on the type "published work", which should be automatically added when you create a new short non-fiction). See the help topic Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical for more information.

Short Non-fiction: Issues

2007-12-08T04:58:44.0012Z

I could use some common bibliographic properties such as issue (text), volume (text), ISBN (text), doi (webpage), etc.

Publishing: Capturing the pseudonym under which a work was published

2007-10-19T00:13:40.0007Z

Not yet. We had a model, but we never got around to debugging it and putting it up. We'll get to it eventually, though!

Publishing: Capturing the pseudonym under which a work was published

2007-10-18T21:42:18.0012Z

Is there an existing property for indicating, for example, that Sylvia Plath's novel "The Bell Jar" was initially published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" (later publications have used her real name)?

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-15T19:14:48.0000Z

I agree: fortunately there are many sources to get records (and also full-texts) from out there. The last suggestion I would give you in this phase is to look also at Open Library, a project by Internet Archive to build the biggest free library on the net. This is the address: http://demo.openlibrary.org/.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-15T17:40:49.0000Z

The LibraryThing model is a very interesting one, and is probably worth exploring further. It seems like there are some very good potential sources for book data out there, and I'm sorry to say that we just haven't had much time to sort them all out. We will get to it though! I just can't say for sure when. The difficulty of sorting the properties from one data-source into Freebase's system is pretty surmountable, though -- we've done it with music data from MusicBrainz, for one, and the music schema is almost as arcane as the book schema.

My guess re xISBN is that we probably qualify as commerical, but it's such a useful tool I'm sure we'll at least look into it when we get serious about loading more book data.

Published Work: Multiple collaborators?

2007-10-13T19:08:54.0000Z

You wouldn't have to convert all the existing contributor information to the new indirect style. I see it more as a way to 'augment' existing types and objects with extra information. For certain objects, it might play a primary role in describing the contributors. But for things like books, with a fairly rigid structure of contributors (basically 'author') the fixed types would be much preferable. For example, if I wanted to say that a particular book had cover art by John Jones, I could attach that information easily and intuitively. A generic way of recording contributor information could also help for adding unstructured information to television and movie objects. Basically it would be a 'catch-all' type in most cases.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-13T10:49:25.0000Z

Hi Jeff, it was so exciting to see the "online versions" link in the book record: WOW! :)
Now a problem might be the fact that some users have already put the link to online version of a book in the "Web link" metadata; I don't know if there is an authomated way to draw the value from "Web link" to fill the "Online version" considering that probably lots of "Web links" are there to intend "link to related websites" and not to the "online version" of the book itself... I'm trying to correct all the books I come across but I'm not sure I'll manage to cover all of them...

Related books: I'm not sure I have understood the problem, but if the point is: let's do an *interface* that gather all the info about the book, showing them like Google Books does, I think - optimistically :) - it's only a matter of time...

xISBN conditions:
"The xISBN Web service is free for non-commercial use when usage does not exceed 500 requests per day. [...]
The service is also available on a subscription basis for non-commercial and commercial use for usage that meets or exceeds 500 requests per day."
(from http://www.worldcat.org/affiliate/webservices/xisbn/app.jsp).

To me, it'd be interesting to use xISBN to *gain* "a substantial amount of data" (i.e. to upload bulk of books' records): you could query the OCLC database by ISBNs already on Freebase and pull down the related editions... Here comes another question I'd like to ask: I think it might be useful for users that want to create books in FB, have the possibility to search the main library opacs (online public access catalogs), as Librarything does - for example the opac of Library of Congress or the Worldcat one etc. The user could then capture the metadata of the book authomatedly, instead of fill in manually every metadata of the book ("copyright", "year", "subject", "Dewey Class" etc.).
I don't know, however, considering the structure of the books represented in FB, if in this case you can
1) extract only some of the metadata from, say, the Library of Congress' record, and put them in the FB *book's record* and
2) then put the other metadata in the FB *editions' record*.
(all in a way invisible for the user...)

In fact the record of a book in FB is about the *intellectual work* and doesn't contain all the info that, instead, are contained in the editions' records...

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-11T23:19:48.0007Z

I added "online versions" to the book type. Thanks for that link to LibraryThing -- that's a pretty exciting project. Regarding xISBN, it would definitely be useful once we have a substantial amount of data; I didn't look into their licensing, so I don't know whether we could use it or not, but it's something we'll definitely look into.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-10T23:44:39.0007Z

I definitely agree about online versions having their own links; I'll add it to book as soon as I get a second, but I'll wait on the other types (story, poem, etc.) for a new feature.

As far as related books go, I'm not sure. If it really is just books on the same subjects, we already are storing that information; to put it in another property as well means that users will have to query against both properties if they want a complete list. I could imagine someone writing an app that displayed Freebase books in a manner similar to Google books' display, though, which would be very cool. But I'm reluctant to put in duplicate data just because of the constraints of the current UI.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-10T20:01:09.0000Z

Related books: mmmhhh... I'm not so sure that "one click away" is as having related books displayed in the same page... Have you had a look on books' pages in Google Books? This is what I mean.
What about xISBN? May be it could be useful for bulk uploading of bibliographical information and - once it is retrieved - it could be nice to see all in the same space.

Websites: I agree on "weblinks" + qualification in the title. That covers, however, only the sites of/about a book. I think it's important to preserve also the full-text link for all the digitized books that more and more public and private companies are putting online. Here a problem could be how to link books digitized by other providers, like Google Books. There is an interesting work going on by Librarything about this: http://www.librarything.com/blog/2007/09/google-book-search-on-librarything.php.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-10T17:35:57.0007Z

The consensus on the data-modeling list is that the current "web links" property is probably sufficient for related web sites. The web links property accepts both a URL and a "title", which can be used for description -- "official website"; "fan website", etc.

Publishing: Will attempt to model physical storage locations of publications privately

2007-10-08T23:16:32.0012Z

Thanks Jeff. I'm working on an article about Freebase for Searcher magazine (http://www.infotoday.com/searcher) and I think I'm getting the hang of things here. Likely what I'm asking for are already available as types under the System category of domains.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-08T22:35:01.0000Z

I think we're already capturing this information, then -- editions are separate topics from books, and are linked from the book topic via the "editions" property; the "book subject" type already links the books (and, I think, essays) on the same topics. The related books are one click away, rather than being on the same page, but I think this should work well enough.

I've gone back and forth about 5 times in the last couple minutes about whether we should have a separate property for "related websites" or whether we should just use the default "web links" property. There's a case for either. I'll post a query on the data-modeling list and see what people think. Your additional thoughts on this would be very welcome, too.

Publishing: Type for physical storage locations of publications

2007-10-08T21:47:34.0000Z

What sorts of properties do you think they should have? Or, perhaps another way of asking would be, what sorts of data are you interested in storing? The quickest thing would probably be to model them in your private domain. Once you're happy with the model, we can see about moving it to the root level domain.

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-10-08T19:11:49.0000Z

As "related books" I intend related editions of the same book (by means of xISBN?), and may be also the books that share the same subject.
For "link to web" it could be interesting to link web sites related to the book - for instance the website of Wikinomics for the homonym book .
In addition you could keep the "full-text" for the online version.

Publishing: Type for physical storage locations of publications

2007-10-07T17:42:47.0005Z

I would like to see some Types added to the Publishing domain that represent the physical storage locations of publications:

Institutional repository (there are several existing Topics that I will suggest be merged)

Library

Warehouse

Thanks!

Book: "Referenced books" or bibliography list

2007-09-26T19:01:48.0007Z

What sort of information, or rather, what type of relationship would you expect "related books" to capture? "Link to full text" is a good idea; I had bee thinking the "website" property could do for that, but you're right that a specific property would be easier to use. I want to hold off on adding it until a new feature is implemented that will allow me to add the property to book, poem, story, etc. more easily and consistently.

Published Work: Multiple collaborators?

2007-09-20T00:44:20.0007Z

This is an interesting suggestion. The main issue is that we would basically have to replace all authorship properties (author, editor, maybe poet, illustrator, etc.) and related types with one contributor property and type. There is some elegance to this, although we would also lose some value -- William Faulkner, for example, would no longer be of type "author" but of type "published work creator" or something like that. (Person is not a good choice because we really, really want to be able to see a list of works that people have written, illustrated, etc. and I don't think we'd want that property on all person topics.) This would be a major change to the schema, and would require a large amount of data migration, so I'd be reluctant to take it on without a lot more discussion. (Also unfortunately, fixing the myriad issues with the publishing domain is far down the list of things I have to fix!)