Discussions on Metaweb System Types

Speaking as a developer, that will bug the hell out of me. Mismatched names is one thing, but having to develop against an API with misspellings just makes the app look sloppy. And I want every developer who touches Freebase to have such a good experience that they end up as in love with it as I am.

As I rack my brain trying to figure out how to fix this, a couple of things come to mind. One is more of a community procedure, and one is a feature request.

Procedure

1. Create a new property with correct spelling, and clone the data to the new property.
2. Mark the old property as deprecated somehow (possibly just in name and/or description).
3. Optional: continuously sync changes on the old property over to the new property.
4. Retire the old property.

Feature work

It's also possible to implement support for renamed properties in MQL. If it were possible to attach aliases to properties in cases like this, we could allow "offset_from_uct" to live on for queries that depend on it, while causing the UI everywhere to reflect that the one true name is the corrected "offset_from_utc". As a perf optimization, I could imagine that MQL only checks deprecated names when it fails to resolve one property's name the usual way.

Speaking pragmatically, with the community as small as it is today, now is a better time to make breaking changes than a year from now when we have millions of eyeballs on us. From my point of view, the global types should be spit-polished, even at the cost of some short term pain. Once we have more eyeballs on things, we'll be able to better cook types before they get promoted to the commons. Meanwhile, we shouldn't apologize for cleaning.

I take it back, these have guids instead of compound values.

We currently don't support exporting a large set of data (approximately around a 1000) via the export to csv feature. You either must use our data dump as mikelove discovered above, or write your own MQL query.

 You can see what our filter view page uses by hitting F8 key to get the debug bar and clicking on the 'View transaction log' (its the client MQL query event you want).

 You can use that as a starting point (hint, modify the limit or eliminate it entirely).

Here's a starter query to get all the film titles currently in the system:

 [
  {
    "limit" : 40000,
    "name" : null,
    "type" : "/film/film"
  }
]

The core infrastructure for supporting per-language property names (not programmatic names) is there, but at the moment the permissions structure is such that you need permission to modify the schema itself in order to add a per-language name.

What we probably need is some kind of infrastructure for suggesting name translations, that could be "approved" by an owner of a type/domain. In the mean time, you could probably write a big MQL write query that attaches names to a bunch of types/properties, and then give it to an administrator for that domain... then they could run it in query editor.

The mql would look something like:

{"query": [{"id": "/people/person/date_of_birth", 

              "name": {

                "value": "Fecha de nacimiento",

                "lang": "/lang/es",

                "connect": "insert"

              }},

             {"id": "...."....}

     ]

}