trs80

trs80: Hi!

2008-06-30T04:53:27.0012Z

Yeah, it's dangerous that way ;) I found the namesake thing pretty cool too. I got from Roald Dahl, to Roald Amundsen, to the Amundsen Sea, and so on. I'll make you "featured" tomorrow -- I don't have the necessary bookmark here at home.

trs80: Hi!

2008-06-29T18:51:17.0000Z

Is the image I've got now OK?

I come back from time to time - I use a separate browser profile due to the heavy use of JavaScript which makes the entire browser slow down after a while. Firefox 3 is somewhat better, but still succumbs eventually. There's also the way Freebase is a horrible timesink (ooh, I can fill out that topic, and that one, which leads to that one), and the nagging feeling I'm just copying data from Wikipedia infoboxes and should be automating it. OTOH it is highly enjoyable reading about random things (like Fred T. Perris) and learning more about the world, which creating namesake links is particularly good at doing.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-26T07:14:01.0012Z

Ok, I see, AD is supposed to be vague. What was tripping me up was the ISO and FIPS attributes do have a clearly defined domain. So maybe they should be kicked out into a new type (principal country subdivision?) that US State, Australian State etc. include?

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-25T19:29:21.0012Z

Administrative division is specifically designed to be somewhat vague, and to be used for everything that falls between the most local government (city/town or equivalent) and the country. I wouldn't call the ISO and FIPs codes "main attributes" -- they're basically just foreign keys. Administrative Division is almost just a "bucket" -- a way to assert that something is an administrative division of a country, and generally bigger than a town. (Some cities are of course both city/towns and administrative divisions.)

Creating separate types for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.-level administrative divisions would probably be even less applicable, since many countries don't have nice clear hierarchies, and in some places the supposed hierarchy is subverted (New York City is the classic example -- its five boroughs are also counties). Using a single co-type for all these things also allows for simpler modeling as well-- if there are only three major types for country divisions, you need fewer properties to link to them and have fewer places where a property might conceivably go.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-25T18:52:38.0012Z

From what I can tell, cities in the US are both naming and administrative. Australian LGAs are mostly administrative divisions, and city/town naming in Australia is separate from them; it comes from the postal system. In large metropolitan areas naming goes state/metro area/suburb (which apparently means 'neighborhood' in USian, and are postal divisions). Suburbs can be split between multiple LGAs, although most are within one.

However the Administrative Division type doesn't fit because its main attributes are ISO 3166-2 and FIPS 10-4 Region Code, which are only defined for Australian States. For the same reason I'd also recommend removing Administrative Division from US County, which is probably the closest analogue to Aus LGA. If required, there's probably room for a new type that is between state and city/town which both of them could include.

trs80: Hi!

2008-06-17T19:03:20.0005Z

Hey, welcome back -- haven't seen you round for a while.

I just wanted to thank you for all the contributions about Perth, especially the public transit stuff. You showed up on my "most active users" report this week because of it all :)

I'd like to make you a "featured contributor" on our homepage, but first I need you to add an image to your user profile. Do you reckon you could do that and then ping me, and I'll do the "featured contributor" thing.

Thanks again!

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-16T18:27:45.0000Z

Thanks for your comment -- figuring out where different governmental divisions in different countries fit can be a bit of a challenge. LGAs are a bit confusing (at least for this non-Australian) -- some of them seem to essentially correspond to what I would think of as a city (e.g. City of Clarence) but others seem to encompass several smaller towns and open space (e.g. Kingborough Council). Or, in other words, it looked to me like they were a level of government between state or territory and city or town. Which is why I gave the type an included type of administrative division.

Australian local government area: remove administrative division

2008-06-14T18:27:17.0005Z

to quote its description, "This type is for administrative divisions of countries of any level below the country itself and above city or town." ie LGAs don't fit. I've manually removed it from a few topics until I thought to look at the schema.

Time: Chronon and time

2008-06-04T06:24:33.0007Z

Oops, there is Time Interval, but it is in the measurement units domain, not the time domain.

Time: Chronon and time

2008-06-04T06:21:26.0001Z

According to wikipedia, chronon is not an interval, but a quantum, and as you say you have a set of chronons there, but the set itself isnt a chronon.

Anyway, that is besides my point. The thing with freebase is ease-of-use, and I don't think this teminology helps at all.

What I am missing though is an time interval type? Iow, a tuple of start and end date/time.

Time: Year type?

2008-04-17T17:07:01.0000Z

I'm not sure what you mean -- what are you trying to browse?

Time: Year type?

2008-04-17T04:14:04.0000Z

I can't seem to browse by Year. Am I missing something?

Time: Changes to events

2008-03-18T18:18:51.0005Z

I'm planning some changes to the following types in this domain:

Event
Historic Event
Historic Period

Basically I want to remove the latter two and just flatten it down to all be "Events". Plus I want to remove the "people involved" property from event.

There's a discussion thread on the data-modeling mailing list at http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/2008-March/000446.html ... anyone interested in these types should probably check it out.

Time: Timelines?

2008-02-12T08:44:32.0000Z

Matt, you’re just about spot-on. The possibility of no start date for an event is a feature, not a bug, and tagging schema is not a completely inaccurate characterization of Freebase.

If you only care about well-defined events, it is trivial to structure a MQL query to only find those events. However, it is accurate to say that the Gunpowder Plot was an event, even if you don’t know the start date. Not only is that a true assertion, it also draws attention to the dateless event, so that it can be brought to the attention of a review project, data quality report, or obsessive historian.

Time: Timelines?

2008-02-12T05:16:44.0007Z

We use no google data. We use some RSS feeds but we seeded our timeline with the wikipedia database. I will check out the data modeling mailing list. I was disappointed to see that an event is valid in the metaweb schema with no start date and reported it as a bug. It looks like data is classified more by a tagging schema than anything else so far. It will be interesting to follow and I think metaweb is an good project.

Time: Timelines?

2008-02-12T03:32:04.0007Z

Matt, viygo.com looks really slick! Looks like you're drawing data from Google News mostly?

There's a lot of talk about events and timelines here at the moment, and I'm just about to post a thread on the topic on our data modeling mailing list. Are you on that list? If not you might want to subscribe. Anyway, I don't have much to say other than "yes, events and time are HAAAAARRRDD" and that we're working on it. Any thoughts/suggestions/comments you might have would be appreciated.

Time: Timelines?

2008-02-12T01:36:40.0000Z

It's my first post and I came to metaweb to check out what they are doing the date/time data. I am working on a timeline project (viygo.com) .

That said there is some interesting stuff around date and time data that can be done and I hope I can contribute to a shared event data schema. iCalendar is okay, but not totally impresssed so far. I am surprised metaweb has not done more data crunching of the wikipedia db to find and validate more date/time events.

Time: Timelines?

2008-01-25T20:38:17.0007Z

I changed the type's name to Time span. The above "Historical period" link will no longer work.

Time: Timelines?

2008-01-25T19:41:11.0024Z

Ed, I prefer "Time span" as a name. We should probably consider all this in the context of the Event refactoring I have in train, which I should probably post about on the data-modeling mailing list, but basically it seems like almost everything that has a start/end date is, in some way, an event or time period, and making "supporting types" that provide nothing more than start/end dates might be really handy for easily querying things like "tell me everything that happened on my birthday".

Time: Timelines?

2008-01-25T07:28:06.0000Z

Upon reflection, maybe my Historical period should be renamed "Time span". Thoughts?

Time: Timelines?

2008-01-25T07:19:08.0000Z

I created an Historical period type in my Summary statistics domain to hold this kind of information. Try it out and let me know how it works. Also of relevance is my new Dated location type to track both when and where topics are made or occur. Both are very simple and should therefore handle any situation when a period of time is of importance (e.g., lifespan of philosophers, constuction dates of skyscapers). If you don't restict it to a single value then the Dated location can even be used to track topic occurrences over space and time (e.g., product manufacturing locations).

Time: Timelines?

2008-01-20T00:27:47.0000Z

Indeed - nested 'events' could be used to do pretty much everything, and would be a good solution for well-defined historical stuff...

However I'm really interested in the more subjective applications of timelines that don't sit so comfortably within the 'event' type – e.g. a timeline of key philosophers or construction dates of skyscrapers...

I'm not sure how this more subjective 'narrative' kind of type sits within freebase, if at all...

I can mock up a schema.

Time: Timelines?

2008-01-16T21:03:20.0000Z

I favor a generalized "Event" with start and end dates. This allows ad hoc creation of various timelines and historic periods. In the case of well-defined historic periods, they could be described as events, tagged with some sort of classification system, and stitched together through an application into a timeline.

Time: What is the difference between weekday and day of the week?

2007-11-27T17:34:16.0007Z

The problem is that both "day of week" and "weekday" are both the expected types of properties on other types, so any merge has to change those properties as well. "Weekday" is used as the expected type of the open and close times on "retail location", which means that the Concierge application probably uses the type, and of course others might, too.

Time: What is the difference between weekday and day of the week?

2007-11-27T04:47:39.0000Z

This looks small enough to merge manually, since it's just 7 items. Day of Week seems to be the more complete model as it includes the relevant calendar as an attribute. I vote we just blow away "Weekday" entirely. Meanwhile, we could make a note that Weekday is deprecated in favour of DoW.

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-10-02T13:06:54.0000Z

Trs80, the reason I can't do that (yet) is because of the bug I reported here which is preventing me from getting the Event type working properly. But yes, it's my intention to do as you describe.

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-10-02T12:23:27.0007Z

Could you add a property Events that takes Historical Events like the Great Depression?

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-17T16:47:14.0007Z

The only option is to change the expected type to "historical event", but I don't know what that does to the rest of your schema. It is perfectly legal, though, for a type to have properties that expect that type.

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-09-17T16:31:20.0000Z

That looks pretty good to me.

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-16T22:54:34.0007Z

Not really, Kirrily. A property currently has a singular expected type. When one type includes another (and thus gets the included type’s properties), there is no way to modify the included properties.

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-16T21:27:06.0000Z

Got an issue with my "Event" and "Historical event" types (and potentially with any other subtypes of "Event").

"Event" has properties "Includes" and "Included by", so that eg. WW2 includes the Battle of Midway. So far so good

Now, when I'm editing a "Historical event", say "Crusades", I add included events "First crusade", "Second crusade", etc. What I'd like is to be able to type those included events as Historical events, not just Events, but because the included property is typed as Event, it's just showing up as that.

Is there any way I can set up Historical event (and other Event subtypes) to use *themselves* as the included/includes event types?

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-09-16T21:20:17.0000Z

I've just added "start date" and "end date" to "Historic period". Let me know what you think.

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-09-15T02:40:03.0000Z

Um, hmm, OK. So should I put my own "start date" and "end date" on "Historic period"?

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-09-13T17:47:45.0000Z

"Time interval" is a compound-value type, and thus cannot be added as an included type (if I'm understanding current rules correctly). I don't think it should really be an included type, anyway, so much as a property. A historical period is often tied to a location, whereas dates apply equally everywhere (differing calendar systems notwithstanding).

Time: Got another one for you: Historic period

2007-09-13T14:13:58.0005Z

I've got a type "Historic period" that you might want to take a look at.

One problem with it: I'm trying to get it to include the type "Time interval" but for some reason I can't get it to show up in the dropdown. Any idea what's up with that?

Time: Time Zone

2007-09-13T12:16:07.0000Z

Or just pull it out of /usr/share/zoneinfo or wherever your system keeps it. The Wikipedia list is pretty vague and incorrect. Timezones have standard names (ISO? Something like that I guess) and the Wikipedia article seems to be ignoring that.

*googlepause*

What you want is the Olsen Time Zone Database. Sources of Olsen timezone data. In Perl, I'd use DateTime::TimeZone to get at this stuff.

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-13T12:03:46.0000Z

No worries, Robert. I've got plenty else to keep me amused ;)

Time: Time Zone

2007-09-13T05:34:00.0007Z

I haven't, but it should be pretty easy to do. I would guess that it has an included type of "location" to allow containment.

This is a list of them.

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-13T05:31:23.0007Z

Sorry for the delay - I've been having some difficulty with our type moving scripts. I will need to enlist some help from our engineering staff tomorrow.

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-13T00:30:25.0000Z

Robert,

Yes, I'd expect "historic site" to be in the Location domain. Makes sense to me.

K.

Time: Time Zone

2007-09-11T23:52:44.0012Z

I've gotten a request to link locations to time zones. Regardless of whether or not this is something we want to do in the location domain, has anyone thought about a time zone type?

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-11T01:52:20.0000Z

I didn't get a chance to move these yet today. I'll take a look at "historic site" -- it may be that this should end up in the location domain, not the time domain. I enjoy when relationships go cross-domain.

Time: Recurring events

2007-09-10T23:53:40.0012Z

Robert: I was considering recurring events next, but thought I'd sleep on it; Australia Day was where that thinking launched off from. Needs further thought, and it's tricky; recurring events make my brain hurt. If we had real "events" for Australia Day 2007, Australia Day 2006, and so forth, it would make an insane mess of the "historical event" which it commemorates. Worse yet for something like "Guy Fawkes Night" which has 400-odd instances or the (admittedly historically debatable) Christmas or Passover with thousands each. So perhaps we need something like "Associated holiday" on "historical event", to allow for recurring ones?

Wrt promotion into the big kids' namespace, we'd probably have to carry along "Historic Site" with it. Have you taken a look at that?

Jeff: Yes, I've seen Peter's stuff and it looks as if his "forecasting event" could easily include the generic "event" I was working on. I blogged about it a little bit here while thinking it through: http://freebasing.org/2007/09/10/events-future-and-past/

K.

Time: Events

2007-09-10T17:35:59.0000Z

Hi Kirrily -- This matches pretty closely a model we created awhile ago but didn't publish. I particularly like your hierarchical nesting and properties for locations and people involved. I'd be happy to promote that along with your other two types.

I did see a strange pattern though. You included "Australia day" as a commemorative event, which is a bit confusing. Events, particularly as you modeled them aren't recurring -- they are one point in time. I could see "Australia Day 2005" being an event, but not the more general topic.

Maybe there should be a "recurring event" type that's similar but more general to the "holiday" type that already exists (and indeed topic Australia Day is indeed typed as Holiday).

Time: Events

2007-09-10T16:56:04.0007Z

At least one other user has been working on events; his types are here:
http://www.freebase.com/view/domain/user/pvonstackelberg/Futures_Studies

Time: Events

2007-09-10T13:57:25.0012Z

I've been working on some types around events. You can find "Event", "Historical Event", and "Commemorative Event" in my personal types. I suspect that if these were promoted to "real" types, they'd warrant some kind of new domain (eg. "Event", hence /event/event, /event/historical_event, etc.) but I couldn't find anywhere better to discuss it but here.

Anyway, comments/suggestions very welcome.

And, how would I go about getting these types "promoted" if people seem to think they're useful and solid?

K.

Time: Chronon and time

2007-09-01T17:13:39.0012Z

My first post on freebase so I don't want to screw it up.

A chronon is an atomic time interval so it would be nice to have the ability to build time constructions based on chronons. For example, the sequence “March 12, 2002; March 13, 2002; March 14, 2002” is a contiguous
subsequence of chronons in a timeline. Contiguous sequences of chronons can be grouped into larger units
called granules, such as weeks, months, years, or decades.

I think the concept of chronon and granule should be part of the time type.

Time: Year type?

2007-07-31T02:58:49.0010Z

oops, my bad, didn't notice the option for varying degrees of accuracy. thanks!

Time: Year type?

2007-07-30T19:35:30.0007Z

You can just use the type "date/time", which allows for any degree of accuracy from year down to seconds.

Time: Year type?

2007-07-30T19:24:05.0011Z

I know I could use integer, but freebase outputs 2001 as 2,001 that way.

My own need for this is a type that has a release date that is only accurate to a month in a year (e.g. 2001/01).