hds

Freebase Applications: "limit" : 0 change in semantics?

2008-07-10T00:36:59.0012Z

The docs are still incorrectly stating zero returns all.

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.

Freebase: Edit a Topic with Redirect Type?

2008-07-08T22:10:50.0030Z

I've removed the type /proficiency from the developers page. There really isn't a way to do this with the UI, so bringing it up here was a good choice.

Freebase: Edit a Topic with Redirect Type?

2008-07-08T20:47:50.0012Z

I accidentally assigned a co-type to the Freebase developers page, and not even on the sandbox :(

However, even trying to access the new instance result in a redirect, so I have no way of removing the type, at least through the GUI.

Freebase: Edit a Topic with Redirect Type?

2008-07-08T19:05:28.0044Z

What are you trying to do? The Redirect type (/freebase/redirect), like most types in the Freebase domain, is a special type, used in the UI, and its instances shouldn't be editable by most users. But there are only four instances of the type, and I assume that you're not trying to edit the home page, so I'm probably missing something.

Freebase: Edit a Topic with Redirect Type?

2008-07-08T02:45:09.0012Z

It doesn't seem like there's any way to edit a topic with the redirect co-type.

I'm guessing there may be some kind of URL param I can enter to avoid the redirect?

Comic Books: Annuals: Stand-Alone Series or Special Issue

2008-07-07T11:41:41.0005Z

Should Annuals (Like Superman/Batman Annual or Sensational Spider-Man Annual) be listed as separate series or under the corresponding series with a special issue number?

Comic Books: Variant Covers

2008-07-06T17:19:29.0005Z

Is there a means of cataloging variant covers in the current system?

Comic Books: Multiple Cover Prices

2008-07-06T14:52:45.0005Z

Would it be possibly to allow more than one cover price on the Comic Book Issue type? I'm looking at my collection of The Spirit and they all have separate US and Canadian prices.

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.

Freebase Applications: What's the difference between /people/person/place_of_birth and /people/person/places_lived

2008-06-07T02:52:45.0007Z

The Explore view is invaluable for this kind of question. If you don’t see a blue tool bar at the bottom of your screen, hit F8; I’ll wait.

OK, now check out the Explore link from Kurt Cobain. It should take you here. You can also just change view to tools/explore in just about any Freebase URL.

In that Explore view, you should see that the outbound /people/person/place_of_birth connects Kurt directly with Aberdeen. However, the inbound /people/place_lived/person link connects Kurt with some weird GUID-named thing. If you click on it, you will see that it is an instance of Place lived, connecting Kurt with Aberdeen. Why is that? Because we also might want to associate start and end dates with his residence there, which we can’t do on a simple, direct link.

This design pattern is called a Compound Value Type, or CVT, and there is more information about them here.

Freebase Applications: What's the difference between /people/person/place_of_birth and /people/person/places_lived

2008-06-07T01:25:30.0012Z

I don't mean semantically of course, I mean why can't I use the same MQL to get them both. For example:

{
"name" : "Kurt Cobain",
"place_of_birth" : [],
"places_lived" : [],
"type" : "/people/person"
}

Gives me:

{
"name" : "Kurt Cobain",
"place_of_birth" : [
"Aberdeen"
],
"places_lived" : [
null
],
"type" : "/people/person"
}

Even though http://www.freebase.com/view/en/kurt_cobain clearly lists Aberdeen for both values. Why can't I query them the same way?

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-31T03:33:34.0029Z

Concerning the story continuation across different media (i.e. comic book series continued in a graphic novel), what about bigger media jumps, i.e. Firefly TV show -> Serenity: Those Left Behind comic book mini series -> Serenity movie -> Serenity: Better Days comic book mini series?

As it's unlikely something like this can be precisely modeled, I think the best we can do is to have an encompassing type that would facilitate finding story incarnations across different media.

For this I created a Media Franchise/Media Property type. Spider-man would be an example that spans all media: movies, MTV animated series, the upcoming Broadway musical, movie novelizations, comic books (obviously), OGNs, computer games, and movie soundtracks.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-31T02:44:11.0000Z

>If CBC doesn't include GN, how would the continues/continued by properties work for series where there are both collections and original graphic novels?

That's a good question and an argument for reusing the GN type. Is it possible to have a property that has more than one expected type?

>Does the property "stories collected" really belong?

I think so. Comic Book Story (CBS) type has no publishing implications. Just like a comic book issue consists of one or more comic book stories (some of which might not be original), an OGN also consists of one (in which case CBS can be left blank) or more CBSs. Some examples of latter are Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall -- of an OGN with multiple original stories by one writer but different artists, and anthologies like Flight with multiple original stories by various authors.

If a book has both previously published comic book issues and new original stories, I would classify it as a comic book [issue] collection. Some Hellboy volumes exemplify this.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-31T02:17:11.0013Z

>typelibrarian

Thanks for the input. I agree about the CBC writer. As for the editor properties, I could go either way, but it never hurts it include more properties as someone might use them.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-30T23:43:46.0008Z

I'm not sure I have any answers, but I have lots of questions. (O Joy.)

If CBC doesn't include GN, how would the continues/continued by properties work for series where there are both collections and original graphic novels? (I think both Gaiman's Sandman and Carla Speed McNeil's Finder fit this description.) On the other hand, I'm not crazy about using a boolean for something like that -- I prefer to use the type system if at all possible.

Other thoughts on the GN type:

Does the property "stories collected" really belong? If it's an original graphic novel, doesn't that imply all new material? Otherwise, isn't it just a collection?

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T23:30:27.0000Z

In terms of editor, I'd say that if the level of precision is valuable, then we should keep the CBC properties. But if we only care about the primary editor, or don't mind lumping all editors together, we could use the property from Written Work.

For writers, I guess the advantage to the denormalization is that "comic book collections written" is more specific than the "works written" property on Author. Chances are, CBCs will end up with values in both properties, which would not be wrong, and is not necessarily bad.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-30T07:12:30.0000Z

If graphic novel (GN) type was included in the CBC type, the GN could have a property 'Original' which would be true for original graphic novels (OGNs) and false for comic book collections. This would work with freebase API, but the keyword search would still be a problem: if you just want to browse the OGNs, the CBCs which are more numerous would pollute the search results.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T06:59:18.0009Z

I guess the Book type Editor property might be reused too, depending on how precise we want to be at the collection level. Some comics credit Editor, Assistant Editor, Senior Editor, and Editor in Chief, but it's not that precise at a comic book issue level either.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T06:51:02.0007Z

I removed the CBC publisher, and also removed the collection cover artist, as different editions might have covers done by different artists. I still think the CBC writer might be good to keep, especially if the comic book writer had a 'Comic Book Collections written' property which would be automatically linked to collections.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T00:16:39.0007Z

I definitely think that publisher should be removed, since it's properly a property of book editions, not books (Jeff Smith's Bone collections, for example, have been published by at least three different publishers). I'm not 100% sure about writer and cover artist. I'm starting to think that these properties are not that different for comic collections than for other types of books. For example, visual artists will probably be listed as authors of monographs; newspaper comic collections will have the writer as author and illustrator as cover artist. I could be convinced the other way, though. (I'll take a look at Graphic Novel tomorrow.)

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-29T08:08:05.0012Z

I'm creating a new type Graphic Novel. It will be very similar to the Comic Book Collection (CBC) type except it won't have the following properties:

Series Collected
Issues Collected
First Issue Collected
Last Issue Collected
Number of Issues
Collection Cover Artist

Should I leave the CBC type as stand-alone or include the graphic novel type and just add the additional properties listed above? If latter, how would a user search for graphic novels only and not get comic book collections too?

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-29T07:39:54.0007Z

I ended up including the Book type in the Comic Book Collection (CBC) type. Both TPBs and hard cover volumes can be modeled through its Editions property. This would also work better for data import: i.e. Amazon has Punisher War Journal Vol. 1: Civil War as hardcover and links to the TPB edition.

Do you agree that Comic Book Writer, Comic Book Cover Artist, and Comic Book Publisher should not be removed from the CBC type even hough they map to more general Writer, Illustrator, and Publisher properties? The users can add comic book specific data after data imports that prepopulate general properties.

Freebase Applications: How to query types in user's domains?

2008-05-28T18:09:10.0000Z

Good question. You can construct a query against the type /type/domain for all domains and its types that are hidden; however, user domains that are not their default domains can be "published", or unhidden, so those won't appear in your result set. The full result set may not be possible in one MQL query.

Freebase Applications: How to query types in user's domains?

2008-05-28T14:29:43.0005Z

Helo all,

I was trying to analyze user defined types - types that are in user's default domain or user defined domain, but not yet promoted to the standard freebase domains. Any idea how to obtain a list of all such types? I was trying some MQL but it doesn't seem to be easy as we cannot use pattern matching for 'id'.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-23T17:40:38.0000Z

I think including the Book Edition type is probably the best solution. And I really think only a few properties don't apply to comic book collections. TPBs and graphic novels are, after all, published like books, and have ISBNs and Dewey classifications and all that stuff. Audio reader is obviously not applicable, and the cover artist and illustrator properties are less precise than we would want for comics; contributing author is about as wrong for comics as it is for everything else -- it's there only for when we don't know more specific data.

(You did, however, just give me a very scary thought. It would not be wrong to model comic book issues using an abstraction/instance model, although it would probably only apply to the cover art in most instances, since variant covers tend to come in and out of fashion. And every once in a while, single issues are reissued, like for Free Comics Day. Not that I really want to do this -- it just occured to me that it would be possible.)

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-22T07:17:20.0007Z

Comic Book Collection does resemble a book edition, but it's not really an instance of abstract written work. And it's definitely not an abstract book/written work.

After all, a comic book issue is a written work in some sense, but we don't have an abstract comic book issue and then an actual published comic book issue.

I think there's too many properties not directly applicable to comic books. But I see your point about importing book data, so maybe inherit the book edition and live with the differences?

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-21T23:49:23.0007Z

I think this is an interesting type, and it has some potential. I'm concerned about its overlap with the types book, book edition, and written work, though. I think it would be good to take out the properties that are duplicated from those types, and get them via including the other types. Before we could do this, though, we'd have to figure out whether comic book collections are books or book editions. The difference is that the topic with the types Book and Written work is for the abstract notion of the work, and contains information that is always true about the work, no matter how it's published -- author, copyright date, genre, etc. Book edition is used for specific publications of the book, and has properties for publisher, publication date, etc.

Comic book collection has properties that correspond to both the abstract and specific notions, so we'd need to figure out where they went.

I want to reconcile the two schemata because we're ultimately going to be getting a lot of book data from various sources, and comic collections/TPBs/graphic novels will almost certainly be included with some of that data, and I'd like to avoid duplication.

But I do like the specificity of contents and contributions that this provides, which is more specific than the contents model in the publishing domain. We could do issues and stories collected using that model, but the roles would have to be less specific (author, editor, interior illustrator, cover artist).

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-21T08:14:22.0005Z

I created a new type Comic Book Collection and populated all Fables TPBs data. Let me know what you think.

If the type is useful enough, what's the process of adding it to the official comics domain? If it gets added there, do I still have some control over it or do further changes need to go through review?

Thanks

Freebase Applications: "limit" : 0 change in semantics?

2008-05-19T19:22:06.0007Z

Set a large number as the limit. But if you truly want all results, you are much better off using a cursor; if you don’t know the reasonable upper bound, then you really can’t have confidence that you’ll get all the results without a timeout.

Freebase Applications: "limit" : 0 change in semantics?

2008-05-19T16:43:27.0000Z

if limit:0 now means return zero returns, how do you ask to return all results?

Freebase Applications: "limit" : 0 change in semantics?

2008-05-05T20:53:13.0007Z

The doc is being revised right now, and that change is on the list. Thanks for asking about it.

Freebase Applications: "limit" : 0 change in semantics?

2008-05-05T14:32:18.0005Z

It appears that setting limit to 0 now limits the number of results to 0, rather than be unlimited, as stated in the online documentation. Is this a recent change? Can you change the documentation if so?

The tutorial says:

Note that we use a limit of one in the above. Specifying a limit of zero means "don't limit the results: return everything you've got".