Supporting Types

Supporting types are containers for properties where the type itself doesn't appear in the Freebase UI. They are used in conjunction with included types to share properties across more than one type.

For instance, statistical region is a supporting type that is included by multiple other types including, country and city/town. It makes it possible to display properties like population and GDP on both countries and cities without creating distinct properties for each that would need to be queried separately. When viewing a topic, such as San Francisco that is both a county and a city, a single property for population appears and the type that contains this property (statistical region) is hidden from display since it doesn't provide the same semantic meaning that its other types do.

There are a couple of steps involved in creating a supporting type.

1. Your new type should be included by another type - this is done from the schema page for that type. For example, when viewing the schema for type B, you would add type A as an included type
2. When viewing type A, you would then select 'supporting type' from the 'display as' menu next to the type name.

That's it. At this point you'll find the properties for type A appear when viewing new instances of type B. This works more or less exactly the same way that included types do, the only difference being that the supporting type isn't displayed in the type list for that topic.