Lists - Best way to handle.

  1.  
    1. May 2, 2008
      monsterceo says:

      Hello,
      I have been thinking about lists and have a few questions. First, there are many lists in Wikipedia as i am sure you are aware. If I would like to bring the contents of those lists along with other lists into freebase, what is the best way?

      I see two options:
      1) Create a type of "list" with properties of "list values. Topics would be things like:
      List of Hot Air Balloon Festivals
      List of Billboard hot 100 songs 1988
      etc

       2) Insert a new property in Musical Track called "awards/accolades." and then allow for a bulk import of song and property list.

      Let me know your thoughts!

      Thank you :) 

      2. crism
        May 2, 2008
        crism says:

        Welcome to Freebase, Stephanie! It’s good to see you’ve been exploring and making some useful contributions.

        1) We’ve actually been trying to avoid the “List of Foo” topics from Wikipedia; in general, we feel that they are a compensation for Wikipedia’s lack of structure. The Freebase type system generally provides a better way to organize that kind of information.

        For example, if there were a Hot Air Balloon Festival type (which there will be as soon as any Freebase user is interested enough in hot air ballooning to create it), then the List of Hot Air Balloon Festivals would simply be the list of instances of that type. Even better, it could be sorted or queried by any of the properties that the type provides, such as date or location.

        The Billboard list is a more interesting case. That’s not really just a list; it’s also an assertion of a special status of its members as distinguished from their peers, a kind of award or recognition. There is currently some interesting discussion on how to approach list-type awards (such as the AFI 100 list of films or the Fortune 500), which would be applicable here. I don’t know what the right answer is right now.

        2) Any Musical Track could be co-typed as an Award-Winning Work and the awards thus attached. That said, I am leery of mass imports of Musical Tracks (as opposed to Songs or Compositions) because reconciliation is so very difficult. If this area interests you, I strongly recommend joining the Music Modeling Interest Group and/or the data-modeling mailing list.

        Thanks for your suggestions and questions!

      3.
        May 2, 2008
        monsterceo says:

        Hey,
        Thanks so much for your reply. I guess the real question has to do with importing this information. I have a group of people who are able to start adding data to freebase, but we want to do bulk imports instead of doing it by hand. I guess this is essentially adding topics of a certain type or adding properties to an existing topic in bulk. Can you tell me who i should ask about how to format this and upload?

        Thanks!

      4. crism
        May 2, 2008
        crism says:

        This is as good a place as any to ask.

        Through the UI, there is a list import option when viewing any type, or any property that allows more than one value. That allows users to paste or upload a tab-delimited list and walks them through the reconciliation process.

        The API can also be used for scripted uploads, although in that case either topics need to be pre-reconciled, or the queries need to be sufficiently well-structured to make it probable that duplicates will not be created.

        Reconciliation—the notion that there is one Freebase topic for any singular real-world concept—is both Freebase’s power and its challenge, and we spend a lot of time working on tools to make that process easier. (There should be a blog post about the reconciliation service very soon, for instance..)



    Discussion is posted in:

    Think this discussion also relates to something else? Cross-post it by adding a new discussion area:

Related Discussions