jonathanwlowe

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T16:22:47.0012Z

Well, I guess it depends on what we want to use it for. Do we want to use generic terms for multiple legal types, or do we want to be more specific.

For example, PLC is Public Limited Company. "Public limited company" could be used to cover all those types in various countries, or it could be for the specific Plc used in UK.

But unless you are intimately aware of what SA (Societe Anonyme) is, or use the Wiki page to see what approximate equiv is, then chances are no one is going to use this field (at least for "harder" ones). I deal with company names all the time, so I'm familiar with Oyj, AG, KgaA, etc, but I don't know what they translate to.

Either way we're missing values. If we keep the "generic" route, then we (I) should comb through the wiki page and identify the big ones we're missing, like "Limited Partnership with Shares" (for SCA & KgaA, for example). Though I'm not sure if all can be mapped (like KK, which is common in Japan, though I think it is usually seen as Co Ltd).

So I think we need to figure out what direction we want to take, generic or country specific, and I don't think either is an easy answer (either you have a long list of specifics or a hard to determine list of generics).

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T15:20:31.0012Z

Enumerated types like Company Type aren’t locked, they’re just a little harder to add to, in order to discourage accidental proliferation. Additions must be made through the query editor or some other way that isn’t the client. We do encourage you to discuss the proposed additions with the community first, though, to avoid edit wars on high-profile types. What specific instances do you think are conspicuously missing?

Business: Company type

2008-08-29T14:00:35.0017Z

Why is Company Type locked? There are many legal structures of companies, and even state-owned enterprises. But very few are listed here. Is there a particular reason for this? If so, it would be good to have that documented so those of us filling in company information know how ot complete this field. Thanks

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-04T19:38:49.0016Z

But there's nothing to link "National Day" as it currently exists, to the country it's connected to.

Wrt flags etc, I intended to link to a topic, yes. Because a flag has properties like "Designer", and start and end dates of when it was used. Eg. the US flag has been through various iterations, and Canada had some kind of Union Jack based flag until quite recently, etc. So the flag property should in fact be date mediated ;)

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-04T19:00:48.0012Z

I was thinking (back in my original post), that since "National Day" is already a holiday type, such a property would be a denormalization. We could decide that's okay, but it's not strictly parallel to national anthem, since there is no similar property for song types. Flag and coat of arms are interesting problems -- there's no way to link to an image with a property. The best we could do would be to link to topics like "Flag of Australia" and "Coat of Arms of Austria-Hungary", which would then presumably have pretty pictures. But it's probably a good idea to replicate the "symbol of administrative region" model at the national level. I'll add a task for it.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-02T08:00:05.0000Z

Oh, well, OK! I'm all in favour of a "civic holiday" type or whatever, and linking it to where it's celebrated. But that's not the same as "national holiday". I think it's up there with "national anthem", and while we're at it, let's add "national floral emblem", "national flag", "coat of arms", "motto", etc as properties!

Ahem. I'm *mostly* serious. It might be the Friday night mojitos speaking. But really, all those are structured information that most-tending-to-all countries have.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-08-02T03:21:05.0000Z

After further investigation, it transpires that the NAICS and SIC classifications were added to /business/industry some time ago. So we plan to deprecate industry_classification. All the same info is available in the other type. I have moved the few current uses of specific industry classifications over to their corresponding industry and plan to retire the type altogether since its no longer in use.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T23:41:27.0012Z

I don't know about Nebraska Day, but Nevada Day is the last Friday in October (formerly October 31), and I'll lay you odds that some cities do celebrate their founding. But what I actually meant was a general way to capture all civic (as opposed to religious holidays), and places they're celebrated. So that you can see all the civic holidays celebrated in some place, and also see that, for example, ANZAC day is celebrated in both Australia and New Zealand, or that Lincoln's Birthday is celebrated in Illinois, Connecticut and California.

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T22:52:35.0012Z

I think the difference is that most countries have a holiday, but most administrative divisions and city/towns don't. I mean, when's "San Francisco Day" or "Nebraska Day"?

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T21:44:53.0012Z

Well, barring yet another type rehash in the Location domain, how about the low-tech, so-simple-it's-dumb solution of creating a holiday property on all three types: country, administrative division, and city/town?

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T20:49:35.0158Z

I'm tempted to broaden this a bit -- National Day is already a holiday category. But the holiday type only has a property for relgions associated with a holiday; it doesn't have a property for places where civic holidays are observed. I think adding a property for the latter would be a better solution. The question for me is -- what should the expected type be? Ideally it should be something that can reciprocate the property. Location seems pretty broad, since rivers, parks, and airports are unlikely to have holidays. We don't really have a type that encompasses all civic types (country, administrative division, city/town).

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T19:20:15.0012Z

ooh, I think that works! I like how you have the options of indicating whether or not it was acquired, etc (which happens a lot). Thanks, Jeff

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T18:24:18.0012Z

Take a peek over on sandbox: I just posted a proposed modification to the company schema to handle divisions on sandbox. See https://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/remington_rand for an example (example expires Monday!).

Location: Country - national day?

2008-08-01T18:12:31.0017Z

Most countries have a national day of celebration for their founding, independence, or similar. Could we make this a property on /location/country? Here's a list of them that I had bookmarked: http://www.kidsturncentral.com/holidays/glossary/defindependence.htm

Business: Divisions & Brands?

2008-08-01T15:42:35.0017Z

Seeing the Calvin Klein Underwear topic with the type of Company attached to it, made me wonder how we want to handle divisions and brands.

I believe the intent for the Company schema is to flag legal companies, like Calvin Klein Inc or General Dynamics Corp. So parent companies and their subsidiaries. If correct, then divisions and brands would not be assigned to the Company type.

If so, then we may need a way to flag topics as a division (or perhaps we do this somehow in the Company schema). Same with brands, which are not always separated from the parent company.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-08-01T06:49:59.0000Z

I think this is correct, that the generic product is not represented well by the NAICS codes. For example the closest you get to 'Petroleum' in the NAICS tree is:

Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing   324
    Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing   3241
        Petroleum Refineries
        Asphalt Paving, Roofing, and Saturated Materials Manufacturing
        Other Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing
             ... all the way down to
                   Petroleum Refineries 324110

Which is clearly not what you want. I do think though that the classification of companies is going to have to come in two flavours, the topic based /business/company/industry and a different property linking to the NAICS (and hence SIC and other codes that map to that same classification).

It would be very hard to merge the industry tree with the NAICS tree without creating new things that had no NAICS codes.

On the topic of NACE, SIC equivalences etc, the plan would be to load them all.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-31T22:11:28.0012Z

Import/export actually expects "industry", which is more general than "industrial classification". Instances of the industry include things like Computers, Consumer electronics, and Petroleum, which are values I would expect to see as imports and exports. I think this is the advantage of keeping the two types separate -- they have slightly different semantics which are useful in different contexts.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-31T16:25:26.0012Z

I'm not sure where to begin on this one.

It is not odd to have more than just NAICS, which is North America specific. NACE is used in the EU, and some countries even have their own classification (like France, the NAF).

And I know D&B still widely uses SIC Code, even though it has been replaced.

I am not familiar with all the codes in the type, but we should research first before removing any, to make sure we're not making the fields North America specific, or if the codes are standard for some reason that is not readily obvious.

As for Industry vs Industrial Classification, I know when I was filling in the Export/Import information in countries, using the CIA World Factbook as a guide, it was difficult or impossible to fill certain values in. You can't export "Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing", instead you export the actual product. So not sure if that means the export/import fields need to be changed or we need another field/category for the industrial classification (less doable)? Or we just live with non-intuitive values in the import/export fields??

Business: New properties

2008-07-30T08:41:14.0005Z

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Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2008-07-30T08:36:47.0012Z

agree above guys

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Business: Joint Ventures

2008-07-18T16:31:52.0005Z

How do we want to do JVs? Technically the companies that "own" the JV would go under Major Shareholders, however there's no way to actually designate the JV as a JV (as opposed to a "regular" company that is public and has shareholders).

Perhaps it could be a Company Type?

Business: DUNS and ISIN identifer fields for company?

2008-07-18T00:11:56.0007Z

You have to pay to use D&B information, so I don't think we'd be able to use the DUNS # here.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-07-09T20:35:32.0000Z

Cool, thanks for the update.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-07-09T18:37:54.0015Z

It looks like the general consensus was in favor of not denormalizing the data, but instead having a synthetic property that could represent current data from the historical data. However, this suggestion is currently not something that is possible, and would require development work. I'll check around to see if there are open tasks for this and update you.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-07-09T15:41:51.0000Z

Did we ever come to a conclusion about this? It seems to have died without an answer in the Data Modeling discussions.

Business: DUNS and ISIN identifer fields for company?

2008-06-27T17:03:01.0005Z

I think it'll be a good idea if these two fields are included for the company type to identify companies...

The DUNS number is widely used and is required by the US government for grants and contracts.

www.dnb.com/US/duns_update

The ISIN seems to be gaining traction in europe and its a ISO standard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Securities_Identifying_Number

Location: Cemetery - for Deceased Person type

2008-06-25T23:48:56.0012Z

There are over 130,000 cemeteries in the GNIS dataset, nearly all with lat/lon. There are a few untyped cemeteries with names ending in 'Cemetery' that already exist, but are untyped and nearly none of them are tagged with GNIS feature ids. The GNIS set would be useful in reconciliation in determining if an existing topic really is a cemetery, but probably not for a bulk load, unless you want 130,000 new cemetery topics.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-24T21:38:56.0012Z

No, no, you're not being obnoxious at all -- this is a persistent pattern. I'm guessing that you're looking for the current head of state of each country, as opposed to the office that the head of state holds. A property for "current head of state" on the country type seems reasonable, but I'm going to repost this to the data-modeling mailing list to get more input because I can see a lot of ways for this to snowball. (If you're not on the mailing list, you can join here: http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling, or just watch the outcome here: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/)

Business: New properties

2008-06-24T19:22:41.0012Z

A suggestion is to add an "End date" property to the Company_name_change type.

Business: New properties

2008-06-24T18:31:10.0012Z

Part of the idea behind topics in Freebase is that there should be only one topic for any given "thing". If a company just changes its name, it doesn't necessarily become a different entity, any more than when a person changes their name.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-24T17:55:30.0012Z

Right, I had seen that type, but when trying to query against the database, it seems more helpful if heads of state were given their own type. For instance, if I wanted to see who the heads of state were in the UK and the US, I currently have to sift through the results to find "President of the United States" and "Prime Minister of the UK". If it were in a separate property, I could just ask for the heads of state of each country and receive only them.

Sorry, not trying to be obnoxious.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-23T23:42:55.0012Z

Heads of state (and all other people who hold government offices) can be listed on the "governmental jurisdiction" type. Most countries should have this type already, but if they don't, feel free to add it. There's some documentation for entering data about government office-holders here: http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000739446b.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2008-06-23T21:36:06.0012Z

Because Country is a type within Location, I figured I'd ask here: Would it be possible to add "current leader" or "head of state" as a property?

Business: New properties

2008-06-23T10:54:37.0000Z

I would rather that each different company name be a different topic.
The company type would have 'name changed from' and 'name changed to' properties.

Location: Cemetery - for Deceased Person type

2008-06-21T00:14:54.0039Z

Cemetery as a type is useful for more than just UI enhancement. It's also useful to be able to find all the cemeteries in an area (unless this is already encoded somehow using a generic GNIS place type classification or something).

Business Location: Reverse relationship to shopping centers

2008-02-13T23:26:55.0010Z

The shopping center type has a property called "Store", which points to retail locations. Can someone enable to reverse relationship (under suggested properties) and call it "Shopping Center" or something so anyone looking at a location can see what shopping center it is in.

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2007-11-19T14:34:22.0000Z

-- sorry for the double post - but I also realized how odd it is to have all the NACE, ISIC, etc. properties when the only one truly in use (i.e. has at least one object that uses it) is NAICS. Why are they there? Are there plans to add this data sometime?

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2007-11-19T08:13:36.0007Z

This issue struck me as strange as well. I think a merge would contribute to both types, since right now both of them are pretty sparse, whereas combining them might reach a critical mass of data.

Business: New properties

2007-10-22T18:54:56.0007Z

"Previous name" might do.

Business: New properties

2007-10-22T15:29:11.0007Z

I can't use the descriptor "name" as it is reserved. What should I use instead?

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2007-10-22T12:37:05.0007Z

Glad you agree, jg -- do you think that a merge of Industry and Industrial Classification types might happen in the short- or longer-term?

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2007-10-22T07:35:38.0007Z

Thanks for the comments. I'll try it again and see how it works.

Business: New properties

2007-10-18T20:43:02.0007Z

I think the property "new name" on the "company name change" type should just be "name". If you're entering previous names, the idea of entering a "new name" is somewhat confusing.

Business: New properties

2007-10-18T18:56:23.0005Z

I just added several new properties and helper types for Company:

Previous names -- holds previous names for companies with the dates they changed

Spin offs (Spun off from) --

Companies acquired (Acquired by)

Created from merger (Merged into) -- This one is a bit more complicated. Two or more companies merge on a particular date and can (but not always) create a new company

Assets sold (Assets acquired) -- A new type "Company asset" can be transferred between companies.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2007-10-16T17:12:24.0007Z

In general, having a couple properties that might not apply to all instances of a type is perfectly acceptable, and often necessary. But in this case I'd also say that city parks do have areas, and for large ones like Central Park and Golden Gate Park, it's probably interesting. But you're right that most people going to a playground or looking for a public tennis court care how big the park is. Still, I can imagine some uses of the property: if we knew the area all the parks in a number of cities, we could do comparisons on total park area per capita, or as a percentage of total area, etc. (I'm not sure who might want these statistics, I'm just saying that I can imagine a use for the property.) As for annual visitors, you're right that it's probably not a useful value for many, or even most city parks, in which case it can just be left blank. But see this link for a list of the most-visited city parks in the US -- somebody's found a way to measure (or estimate, anyway) this.

Location: City Parks/Golf Courses

2007-10-16T14:46:57.0007Z

I explored adding protected_site as an included type.

This brought in two parameters that make sense for national, state
and county parks but are out of context for city parks.

Area (sq km) - This seems more of interest to people who are going
to large parks for hiking, biking, and other activities that require space. It's
of less interest for parent taking their small kids to a local park.
Annual Vistors - This can't be measured for most city parks. There's no
admission fee or other way to track users of most City Parks.

jonathanwlowe: Removed Organism type from your topic

2007-09-27T21:03:56.0000Z

Thanks for taking the time to let me know, Jeff -- very human of you.

jonathanwlowe: Removed Organism type from your topic

2007-09-24T03:34:46.0012Z

Hi Jonathan. I removed the Organism type from your topic page since we are changing how we specify that a Person is a Human....

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2007-09-08T07:45:36.0007Z

I agree that the Industry type should be merged with the Industrial Classification type. I believe that Industry was derived from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Industries but Ill check on that....

Business: Industry parent/child vs. Industrial Classification parent/child

2007-09-06T21:15:41.0005Z

The two types, 'Industry' and 'Industrial Classification' each have (distinct) parent/child properties. Should they be merged?

I'm asking because I want to be able to query retail locations filtered by their geolocation (for instance a bounding box in South London defined by latitude and longitude values) and then tally the results by industrial classifications -- for instance, reporting on the total 'Taxi and Limousine Service' instances regardless of whether their finest grain of industrial classification is 'Taxi Service' or 'Limousine Service'. The 'Industrial Classification' type already has parent/child industries populated, but the 'Industry' type parent/child properties are less reliably populated. If they're the same, should they be merged? If not, how are they different?