Freebase: Discussion about skud

General Support: Export Amount property for Industry

2009-12-21T19:07:22.0006Z

It's for a monetary value; I've updated the help text to reflect this.

General Support: Export Amount property for Industry

2009-12-21T18:29:38.0000Z

Is the AMOUNT property to be described as TPY ? Tons per Year ? (If so, can someone please add it ?)

In building more on the PORTS base, I'm increasingly coming across bits of statistics concerning imports and exports and would be willing to fill in the blanks for some of these as I find them. I'd like someone to clarify this property for me in advance.

Example : http://www.freebase.com/view/en/reydarfjordur (Aluminum statistic gathered from ALCOA publication)

Thanks! -THAD

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-19T20:12:01.0002Z

Your composer type has the commons composer as an included type. This means that whenever you type a topic as /base/catalog/composer, that topic will be automatically typed as /music/composer. This is just a convenience, there is no other relationship, semantics or syntax gained.

If yo are interested in loading music data, you should subscribe to the data-modeling@ mailing list because the music schema will undertake some major changes in the coming months!

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-19T05:47:08.0014Z

Thanks . What links my composer type to the main composer type?

I would be looking at extending my base to allow lists of composer works with opus and catalog numbers, in due course. I won't be able to load too much into it but would be happy to (help)develop the structure and will be linking into it (maybe feeding as well as reading) from Songbird. (I built the catalogs base for a lyrics getting Songbird add-on I will be releasing soon...)

I've posted on the BWV and composition pages, suggesting we link up.

Simon

General Support: Long and storied history

2009-12-18T00:36:02.0006Z

Tom's comments seem right on target to me. The issue is complicated in two ways: one is that, as in the Vanity Fair history linked above, people often talk about magazines of the same name (whether or not the rights to the name were legally transferred from one publisher to another) as if they were the same magazine in any meaningful way. The other is that some people, including many libraries, often treat name changes as creating new entities.

Re WSJ, I agree that mere change in ownership or publisher shouldn't result in a new topic -- periodicals are bought and sold between publishers all the time, and the publishers themselves are always merging and splitting. This is why the publisher property of the periodical type has from and to dates.

General Support: Long and storied history

2009-12-17T23:56:10.0013Z

Yes, the discussion forums associated with the type/schema are the best place to discuss general things about the newspaper type.

Whether or not two things represent the same concept is somewhat of a subjective judgement, but usually it's pretty clear. The name is most definitely not the only or even primary consideration. If someone sells or licenses a name for a completely different magazine, it still represents a different thing. A strike, no matter how long, doesn't make a newspaper a different thing when it returns (unless it went out of business in the mean time).

This history of Vanity Fair http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/vintage/oneclickhistory describes, in my opinion, five different magazines with the name "Vanity Fair" in addition to a sixth published briefly by Condé Nast called "Dress and Vanity Fair." The history writer attempts to emphasize the continuity, but a 50 year gap and a "relaunch" with different owners, different editors, and different writers makes it a new magazine with the same name, not a relaunch of anything (even if they purchased the name).

If the original owner rehired her editor-in-chief and started publishing again after a 5 year hiatus, you might have valid arguments on both sides as to whether it's the same thing or not, but in most cases it's pretty clear cut.

General Support: Long and storied history

2009-12-17T21:42:34.0013Z

Thank-you very much for the Library of Congress resources! That's a treasure trove of resources @ the LOC--I haven't yet looked to see if their Chronicling America @ the LOC is linked on a "Newspaper Researcher Resources Topic."

Getting back to the Long Island Press, is the Schema where the specification of a Newspaper lives? http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/book/newspaper

I don't know much about Schemas--but there must be someplace were a schema is and can be discussed in detail, but I digress.

Assuming a newspaper is owned by a corporate entity then a change of ownership, or a change in control of that ownership, does not (for the purposes of this discussion--for the Newspaper Topic--from my point of view) make for a new Topic.

Continuity is binary, but there are work stoppages, strikes, etc. (I wonder what the longest strike or work stoppage was as they happen all the time) that make this much more than a yes or no decision.

In this case you are correct, the Long Island Press of 2003 is clearly a different Newspaper from the Long Island Press of 1977 except for at least one thing: The Name. I have no idea, however, if the 2003 incarnation is using the same, or similar logotype, or if the 2003 version bought the any rights to the name or otherwise.

The Wall Street Journal was most recently purchased by News Corp and notwithstanding any editorial changed brought about by new owner it should be the same Topic as it was under the previous (Bancroft family) ownership, right?

The Magazine Vanity Fair that is published today is a somewhat different case in that Vanity Fair was a magazine that was edited by Condé Nast (himself) and ceased publication in 1936 and presumably the name was the property of Condé Nast Publications which may have existed in 1936. There was, and is, value in the name and the logotype..and even if the only constant is the name; the name is the same.

It would be a very interesting graph indeed to see all of the various Newspaper Names and the continuity, or lack thereof, of these names; I think this is easy to do with Freebase and look forward to learning how to to this and lots of other fun things here.

General Support: How does one change the main type of something

2009-12-17T06:33:54.0000Z

It looks like you figured out how to add additional types, but just to clear up a misconception, there's no such thing as a "main" type. A topic can have as many types as you like. The UI tries to guess which ones might be most relevant to display in a given context and will bias things in favor of the types from the Commons, but other than that, all the types are created equal.

General Support: How does one change the main type of something

2009-12-16T17:14:02.0011Z

Hilton Waterfront Beach Resort shows up as a structure when it should show up as an accommodation. How do I change this?

General Support: Long and storied history

2009-12-16T05:16:41.0005Z

I created a placeholder for the other newspaper, Long Island Press and added a link to the Library of Congress' description(s). I'm not sure that Wikipedia's description (cribbed from the current LI Press?) is all that accurate, so you might want to research it a bit more when fleshing things out.

General Support: Long and storied history

2009-12-16T04:58:13.0000Z

So the first thing that's obvious here is that there are two different Long Island Presses. Although Wikipedia distinguishes things mainly by name (thus two separate newspapers covered in the same article), Freebase has no problem with having two different newspapers of the same name, one ending a long run in 1977 and the other adopting the name in the last few years. Conversely, I'd add the various names of the original newspaper as aliases, as long as it was nominally the same paper in continuous existence. There will always be grey areas, so just use your best judgement as to whether something is the same thing with a different name or two different things.

General Support: Freebase-parallax as downloaded pops a JSON field cannot parse error. My intent is to have a timeline of a view of freebase. Anyone else experiencing similar error messages?

2009-12-15T23:56:35.0002Z

gone to the blogs and google this puppy. i am reduced to asking for your help.

General Support: Long and storied history

2009-12-15T07:50:44.0018Z

The Long Island Press has a long and storied history that is missing here.

Any suggestions on how to record it?

Quoting the current wikipedia article: The Long Island Press was the name of a daily newspaper that lasted for 156 years. It was originally known as the Long Island Farmer which was founded in the 1840's. The paper changed its name to the The Long Island Daily Press in the 1920s, and then became simply Long Island Press in 1967. The Sunday edition bore the name Long Island Sunday Press. Both editions used a broadsheet format. It became known as the only New York paper to report on local government scandals until an extended strike by the Printing Pressmen's union forced the paper to go out of business on March 25, 1977[2]. Regular columnists included Walter Kaner.

How should this history, which includes multiple first issues be entered?

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-15T06:08:21.0013Z

If you look at Mass in B Minor you can see how multiple similar types applied to the same topic end up looking to the user. Basically your Composer type would just hold the reciprocal link to the catalog while the main commons Composer would contain all the other relevant information.

Are you thinking of extending your schema to works enumerated in the catalogs? You might consider collaborating with Raymond Yee on generalizing the work that he did for JS Bach BWV numbers in the Johann Sebastian Bach base.

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-14T23:21:23.0018Z

Will using 'composer' in my catalog base pick up the other info about that composer from the other base(s)?

I don't really understand how to link my info. with the data already in Freebase! and what the path is from a stand-alone database to something integrated with everything else in Freebase.

I'd be grateful for any pointers.

Simon

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-14T23:17:00.0005Z

Thanks for the reply - the question was barely coherent! ('cut and paste fever').

'Amending a commons schema' sounds like a big deal!

All I want to do is get my base linking to existing composer info. and showing up when people look at a composer. Am I going about this the right way?

I'm not insistent on keeping ownership of the data and would like to make it available for anyone to use/add to.

Simon

General Support: Is it appropriate to edit out data integrity inconsistencies?

2009-12-14T19:03:36.0013Z

OK, Thanks. I've tweaked those two named examples. Hopefully I won't hit too many editorial decisions. I'd already removed a loop which had http://www.freebase.com/view/en/brown-eyed_soul as both a sub and super genre of http://www.freebase.com/view/en/rhythm_and_blues because that made no sense, but thought I'd check this sort of repair was OK and would have a constructive effect. There is another few in the import I've tried so far, I'll modify my system to make it easier to track and fix...

General Support: Is it appropriate to edit out data integrity inconsistencies?

2009-12-14T18:22:19.0013Z

A lot of stuff like this are just simple mistakes, so yes, cleaning it up would be a help. Cycles in this type of schema are clearly a logical inconsistency that should be fixed. For cycles of length 1, it's pretty easy to tell where to break the cycle. For longer cycles, if you can tell where to break them, go ahead and do it. If there's a question, or you need help, post a discussion note to the relevant topics and someone more familiar with the topic might be able to clarify where the cycle should be broken.

General Support: Is it appropriate to edit out data integrity inconsistencies?

2009-12-14T18:13:08.0000Z

I'm importing a set of statements about Music Genres as an exercise. I get some retrieval problems because of (among others) http://www.freebase.com/view/en/gothic_metal

This entry has been set as both a super-genre and a sub-genre of itself. Without trying to be a fact-checker, I'm pretty sure that is not actually possible under the concept of sub-genre. So I think I should remove that relationship by hand.

There are a few other, longer loops also. http://www.freebase.com/view/en/garage_rock is apparently a super- and sub- genre of http://www.freebase.com/view/en/psychobilly I'm not an expert in the field, but there is something intrinsically inconsistent with this.

I realize that this sort of situation will arise when combining disparate data sources, so it's basically inevitable. I guess also that there is no reasoning or constraints being applied to prevent it.

Therefore ... would any attempt at gardening these paradoxes out of the system be entirely futile?

My consuming app is going to have to sanitize this data itself, so that's fine. My question is should I use the warnings that I'm discovering to come back here and clean things up for everyone?

General Support: Incorrect ID

2009-12-14T15:11:19.0013Z

Thanks for the clear explanation!

I understand that each URI is really just a GUID of sorts, and the data works fine when requested by that name. It just looked erroneous to be using that one as the primary ID when I queried for http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/music.genre . It was an odd one out. I was a bit concerned that something with a UserID in the path may be sandbox data rather than canonic. Is there a way to promote http://www.freebase.com/view/en/country_music to being the 'preferred' or primary ID? ... Or not ... I see that is actually meaning a specific album name :-( . Dang.

FYI, the issue is: I'm testing a facility to import and reference shared vocabularies, and was planning to use the supplied URI/GUIDs as a primary key in an internal RDF triplestore. (Maybe I shouldn't do that, and just internalize the sameAs relations)

The given URI will still work (thanks for clearing that up) but just looked out of place in the diagnostic logs I was seeing. Partially (my fault) because my code is using the key found at the end of an URL as a temporary name for placeholder topics that haven't been individually fully retrieved yet. This is an ugly short-cut, but was returning sane results most of the time. My data queue listed : [ ... pop_music, trance_music, 00b3-10cd, breakbeat, black_metal ... ] ... I'll eventually be able to resolve that as I get the preferred name I guess. Just something to know! Thanks again. I think I'll be able to work with this..

General Support: Incorrect ID

2009-12-14T14:08:44.0013Z

This is entirely expected. Each entity in Freebase can be referred to either by its GUID, or by an arbitrary number (possibly zero) of other IDs; there's then an algorithm which chooses the "primary" ID for each topic. Put simply, this algorithm chooses the shortest ID from the ones available, or uses the GUID if none exist.

In this case, the topic had not been assigned another ID (note that both /en/country and /en/country_music are used elsewhere), so when it was given an ID in Arthur's personal namespace, it started using that as its primary ID. However, nothing has changed here: you can still refer to this topic by its GUID or even by a number of Wikipedia keys, or even by its Wikipedia numeric article ID if you want. (The /wikipedia keys are never allowed to become the primary ID for a topic, which is why you weren't seeing those before). In the same way, you'll see raw GUIDs for any topics which don't have any other ID set.

Is this change of primary ID causing you a problem?

General Support: Incorrect ID

2009-12-14T13:07:16.0014Z

Something has happened to this topic (Country Music). When the ID /user/avh/ellerdale.00b3-10cd was added to it, it seems to have taken over the identity of this resource. Now listings that include the concept of 'Country Music" Now instead include the concept of this odd User-defined Id

eg http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/music.genre http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/type.type.instance [ http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.pop_music. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.trance_music. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/user.avh.ellerdale.00b3-10cd. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.breakbeat. http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.black_metal ]

I can see when the erroneous ID was added http://www.freebase.com/history/view/user/avh/ellerdale/00b3-10cd But I can't see how to undo it.

I'm spotting a few other oddities (raw GUDs) in instances under music.genre as well.

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-14T06:48:25.0013Z

simonhill,

I think it's because you linked to the wrong Composer type from Thematic Catalog. You linked it to the Composer type in the Music commons (which as masouras says can't be easily changed). I see that you have created a Composer type in the Catalog base which you probably meant to link to. You should change where the property links to, and ensure you click the Composer in your Catalog base.

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-14T04:58:20.0013Z

You have to get someone who is an admin of the Music domain (/music) to add it.

However, we don't usually link to base or user properties unless they move into the commons schema. If you want to propose amendments to any commons schema, you can always ask in the data-modeling@freebase.com mailing list.

Subscribe here: http://www.freebase.com/build

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-14T01:00:10.0000Z

How can i get iy shiow up when looking at composer topic?

General Support: how do i get do not have permission to add a return property on Composer.

2009-12-14T00:59:28.0020Z

I've made a composer's thematic catalog database .

General Support: Search by latitude and longitude

2009-12-11T20:17:17.0038Z

http://www.freebase.com/docs/geosearch

General Support: Search by latitude and longitude

2009-12-11T18:31:40.0049Z

I would like to find all businesses or points of interest within a certain radius of a given latitude and longitude. Can anyone help me with the right call to make for that?

General Support: Can I import a JSON dataset ?

2009-12-08T23:31:13.0000Z

Great, but I'm not sure how to :P

Should I write an app?

Thanks for your reply.

General Support: Can I import a JSON dataset ?

2009-12-08T22:22:34.0006Z

Sure, as long as it's appropriately licensed.

General Support: Can I import a JSON dataset ?

2009-12-08T22:17:58.0000Z

Generated with dbpedia.org/sparql ?

General Support: Can I export delicious bookmarks to Freebase?

2009-12-08T18:00:32.0013Z

I understand your general goal, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how tagging services will work in the example that you gave. A spreadsheet is definitely the most directly applicable approach, in my mind, but I see a couple of possibilities for tagging services.

If you use a service like Diigo that has a comment field, you could define a little meta language for describing attributes. e.g. Found: 1956 Owner: Rupert Murdoch etc...

This is flexible and powerful, but is completely free syntax with no tool support, so any errors won't get caught until you try and parse the information and find you can't understand it.

You could define a set of tags and meanings for their mappings so that a news web site that gets tagged with "Egypt" you interpret as meaning that they cover Egypt as geographic area of focus. You could extend this so that "hqEgypt" means headquartered in Egypt while "coverEgypt" means they cover Egypt, but this quickly explodes out of control (and is counter to how people expect the tags to work). The problem is that you basically trying to encode the column heading and cell value from your spreadsheet in a single tag. This only works well for a small universe of values (for example, your date founded example wouldn't fit very well like this).

It seems like a spreadsheet is a better fit for detailed data collection. Perhaps you could use a tiered approach with one set of people doing identification and basic categorization of sources with a smaller, more sophisticated followup team that use spreadsheets to capture the data (perhaps transcribed from a filled-in email template that you have people submit information via?).

I don't feel like I'm helping very much, but I don't think I know enough about conditions on the ground to be able to offer relevant advice.