Freebase: Discussion about evening

Organization: Dated Headquarter

2009-11-15T11:05:41.0003Z

I just recognized, that it is possible to add dates to the "places lived property" (I did that for my profile a few month ago ;))

Architecture: Delete "tower" type?

2009-11-15T09:45:00.0053Z

http://www.ctbuh.org/HighRiseInfo/TallestDatabase/Criteria/tabid/446/language/en-US/Default.aspx

The CTBUH defines a tower as having less than 50% of the height occupied. As we have kept the tower type, could we add this as a definition to the description of the tower type?

I doubt we would have much data for percentage of height occupied, so limited use in adding that as a property to tower.

evolution: Careful with musical roles, please

2009-11-15T08:55:20.0014Z

ok, noted.

Piston configuration: Documentation?

2009-11-15T08:38:37.0000Z

I've revised the documentation.

Dam: Dam, something is wrong with the property for purpose of dam

2009-11-15T08:29:21.0025Z

I get a bug when view the type schema for the expected type "Dam reservoir use" http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000999ea71

I think that may be where the problem lies. I've recollect that I might have changed the key recently....

Reaction engine: Specific Fuel Consumption

2009-11-15T08:18:47.0028Z

Yes, and also brake specific fuel consumption. (just added it to piston engine)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_fuel_consumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumption

Units are grams per kiloNewton seconds, and grams per kiloWatt hours respectively.

Engine: Date/time s/b unique

2009-11-15T06:47:22.0007Z

Strange - it is shared from /base/engineeringdraft/manufacturedcomponent/first_introduced_ which is unique.

I deleted the property and tried again, but it seems to still be non-unique.

Battery size: Would this be the expected type?

2009-11-15T06:30:27.0008Z

It should really be Battery size, but unfortunately depending on the cell technology used (alkaline, Metal hydride etc..) various electrical properties of the standard size vary. I've kept Battery size for geometric properties only, and electrical properties are introduced on the battery type.

Therefore, you need to expect the Battery type on any properties.

A list of sizes, including button formats, is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_sizes

Organization: Dated Headquarter

2009-11-14T19:34:35.0013Z

Yes, indeed. Most of the organizations, I would like to add, do not exist anymore. Most of them, like the World Zionist Organization (which still exists) (http://www.freebase.com/view/en/world_zionist_organization), changed their headquarters a few times.

I think (also for future editing) it is much better to have the possibility to add dates to such properties ( another example is person_places_lived), in general. Because otherwise you have to delete data (which might be important for many people) erverytime when e.g. headquaters will change. What do you think?

best regards,

Frank

General Support: Bulk download of images

2009-11-14T03:56:52.0014Z

Is this something you plan to do on an ongoing basis? Our daily API calls limit is 100K.

Please remember to attribute back: http://www.freebase.com/policies/

Could you provide some more info about your site/project?

Thanks for using Freebase!

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-14T00:48:43.0005Z

Added Casting, Production Design, Art Direction to the sandbox /film/film type for your perusal.

If no-one is objecting I could make these live on production late Monday, Nov 16 2009.

Piston configuration: Documentation?

2009-11-13T22:11:51.0018Z

I think some words are missing from the type documentation. :)

Reaction engine: Specific Fuel Consumption

2009-11-13T22:01:39.0018Z

Do we need a new dimension for specific fuel consumption for this type?

Engine: Date/time s/b unique

2009-11-13T21:55:39.0006Z

This type looks pretty good; I'd make "first ran" unique, though.

Battery size: Would this be the expected type?

2009-11-13T21:31:28.0006Z

Thinking more about batteries: Say I had a type for "personal electronics", and I wanted a property to hold information about what sort of batteries a device used. Would this be the appropriate expected type? It would obviously be so for old-school types like AA Battery, but would it work for the tiny little watch-sized batteries, too? I don't know if they're standardized for size.

Organization: Dated Headquarter

2009-11-13T21:10:13.0006Z

We could do it, although it would be a major change which would break any apps using this data. Both the Company and Organization types assume "current headquarters" currently -- do you have a strong need for historical headquarters data?

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-13T21:01:20.0006Z

Funkily enough, "executive produced" does seem to be a fairly standard usage, amongst industry media, anyway.

General Support: Bulk download of images

2009-11-13T14:49:22.0049Z

Hi Freebase,

First of all, thanks for an excellent service!

We are planning to perform a bulk download of images for thumbnailing purposes, using the trans api (typically by requesting http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/image_thumb/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000020b7a5?maxwidth=500&maxheight=500 etc.)

We are planning to decorate around 400 000 entities with images this way.

Are the images available some other way (via a dump for instance) or do we have to use the api to perform this? If the later, are there any limitations regarding requests from the api? We dont want to put too much load on freebase and/or block ourselves out..

Best regards, Kristofer

Dam: Dam, something is wrong with the property for purpose of dam

2009-11-12T22:23:31.0008Z

Not a valid typename, may need to delete it and recreate?

{ "/api/status/error/mql/parse" : [ { "code" : "/api/status/error/mql/parse", "info" : { "id" : "/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000999ea71", "key" : "type", "tid" : "cache;cache01.p01.sjc1:8101;2009-11-12T22:17:47Z;0019;-5" }, "message" : "not a valid typename", "path" : "/base/engineering/dam/purpose_of_dam", "query" : { "/base/engineering/dam/purpose_of_dam" : [ { "error_inside" : ".", "guid" : null, "id" : null, "index" : null, "limit" : 1001, "name" : null, "optional" : true, "sort" : "index", "type" : "/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000999ea71" } ], "id" : "/en/itaipu" } } ] }

Organization: Dated Headquarter

2009-11-12T16:03:24.0039Z

Is there a possibility to add a date (from until) to the headquarter property?

Business Location: Classification property for Retail Location?

2009-11-12T08:15:53.0014Z

That would work, although I'd try to avoid using the word 'type' in schema - it gets confusing when discussing schema types.

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-12T01:32:49.0025Z

I'd prefer the former, both pointing to film producer which would have films produced and films executive produced as a return linkages... Well that doesn't scan too well. Served as executive film producer on ... ?

Business Location: Classification property for Retail Location?

2009-11-11T22:08:52.0005Z

How about "type of business location" as a name?

Business Location: Classification property for Retail Location?

2009-11-11T21:53:31.0001Z

Just came across this. I'd definitely support a business category property on business location.

It would be useful to model whether a business location operated by a company is a cafe or their offices.

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-11T21:52:01.0000Z

Well, that's pretty true. Thinking about it further, it does seem that an executive producer in film is a completely different sort of role than the other various types of producers (despite the similiarity of names), so creating a new property makes sense. Next question: should it expect the existing Film Producer type or a new Film Executive Producer type?

Consumer product: Relationship with Business commons types?

2009-11-11T20:06:59.0030Z

Re iPod: The choice of at what level of the consumer product/product line hierarchy to put the manufactured component type is probably an important one. The semantics of the Manufactured Component type would seem to drive this toward a lower level in the hierarchy -- either to Consumer Product itself, or to a lower-level Product Line. Material Composition by Mass is the most obvious in this regard, but even properties like Total Production and End of Production are arguably more interesting at the lower levels (e.g. iPod Nano 4th Generation or whatever).

Business Location: Parent_Company is Unique

2009-11-11T19:20:51.0021Z

Um, I can't think of a good reason why it's non-unique. I'll throw it out to the mailing lists to see if anyone can think of a use case (and also because uniquifying is a breaky change).

Consumer product: Relationship with Business commons types?

2009-11-11T19:15:38.0030Z

Manufactured component should be the set of all consumer products, and also government produced items and B2B items etc..

I've entered data to illustrate the Apple, Foxconn (aka Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.) & iPod relationship http://www.freebase.com/view/en/ipod/-/base/engineeringdraft

In this case the manufactured_component site with the product_line and not the consumer_product type, but given the phylogeny pattern I think this is suitable. (or do we need a manufactured_component line??)

@Tom, so long as we get a high-level relationship that a manufacturer had something to do with the creation of a component I think that should be sufficient. We don't really need the fine-grain detail of individual part instances and their serial numbers at this time, but I see your point of how the differences that make a component distinct from other components is very minute.

@Jeff, wrt Manufacturing Plant - I think you are correct. The operations of a manufacturer in a plant are HAS-A location, not IS-A, so including /business/business_location seems best. I've emphasised this relationship by renaming manufacturing_plant as manufacturing_location. Also removed the CVT between a manufacturing location and the operating manufacturer.

In addition I had a couple of suggestions for improvement of /business/business_location see:

Business Location: Closing date

2009-11-11T19:13:46.0035Z

Yes! We should have done that ages ago -- sorry about that!

Business Location: Parent_Company is Unique

2009-11-11T18:57:20.0030Z

Is there any reason why parent company is non-unique? Could it be unique?

Throw in a /business/business_location/closing_date and as business location HAS-A /location/location, business location provides time-mediation between an individual company and a location.

Business Location: Closing date

2009-11-11T18:51:13.0024Z

ah no! it's to remain HAS-A location http://markmail.org/message/db76hw73tdof6upm?q=freebase+list:com.freebase.data-modeling+date:200911+from:%22Jeff+Prucher%22&page=1

Scrap the request for dated location!

Could we get a /business/business_location/closing_date though?

Business Location: Closing date

2009-11-11T18:39:50.0017Z

If I understand https://bugs.freebase.com/browse/DA-808 then business location will be IS-A location. If so, can we reconsider using the dated location type? This would allow us to then delegate business location's opening_date property (and a new closing_date property) to the relevant dated location property.

Consumer product: Relationship with Business commons types?

2009-11-11T07:18:44.0029Z

The thing that a consumer sees as a single product is an elaborately choreographed dance behind the scenes. I'd guess that that is what the Manufactured Component vs Consumer product split is supposed to indicate. There's a lot more variability to an Apple 8 GB iPod Nano than just the casing color. In the manufacturing/design workflows that I'm familiar with, the whole thing is driven by BOMs (bills of materials), part numbers, variants, and revs with all changes under change order control.

A change as small as a newly edited "Thank you for buying me" letter or a different firmware load for an EPROM will cause new part numbers/revs to be assigned. Any part could be multi-sourced, so they could be using Foxconn and Benchmark or Foxconn could be using both Samsung and IBM flash memory or there could be multiple printing vendors qualifier for manuals or -- well, you get the idea.

Two otherwise identical parts from different vendors get different part numbers, because that's how all these changes get tracked. Whether or not a component change results in a different part number for the higher level assembly gets decided by the design engineer and/or product manager, but at a minimum, a change will create a new rev.

Once Apple sells the product on, they become the "manufacturer" for the next level vendor (say I'm doing an iPod + hoodie + earbuds bundle) and Foxconn vs Benchmark becomes invisible.

I'm not sure tracking things at this level has any use outside of the manufacturer/designer, but that's how it's done in my experience and it does support having different views of who the manufacturer is internally and externally.

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-10T21:47:57.0038Z

I think the break would be pretty catastrophic given how many apps are built on Film now.

I would strongly prefer a new property over mediating the Producer relationship.

Consumer product: Relationship with Business commons types?

2009-11-10T21:35:55.0014Z

I am wondering about the relationship of the Manufactured Component type to the Consumer product type, if any. Obviously, not all manufactured components need to be treated as consumer products, but some surely should be, which leaves us with a bit of a denormalization, I think, unless the expectation is that the properties "Manufacturer" (from the Manufactured Component type) and "Made by company" (from Consumer Product) are not necessarily the same thing. E.g., Apple is the correct value for "made by company" for an Ipod, but Foxconn is the manufacturer. Is that the idea?

Also, I think there might be a bit of collision between Manufacturing Plant (MP) and Business Location, since Business Location explicitly includes factories as one of the things it can represent. Although I see we already have this problem in the Automotive domain, with that manufacturing plant type. However, the fact that MP has a CVT for operation complicates this somewhat, since Business Location is not time-mediated. I don't have any proposals for resolving this at the moment, but I think it bears discussing.

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-10T21:16:47.0058Z

I prefer inserting the mediator, although it's a breaky change. It would bring film into line with TV shows, though: TV Producer term

Film: Production credit, Executive versus the rest

2009-11-10T20:57:33.0026Z

I believe it may be advantageous to separate out the role of an Executive Producer from that of the Producer (and Assistant/Associated Producer).

We could do it simply with a new property for Executive produced by, example on sandbox, that points to Film producer. Regular production and associated/assistant production would remain with original property.

(Better might be inserting a mediator between Produced by and Film Producer, with enumerated topics for Executive, Associate, Assistant, and blank for the regular credit.)

Any objections? Improvements?

Job title: SIC Codes

2009-11-10T00:25:17.0006Z

NAICS 2007 codes have been loaded into Freebase on the Industry type. There's a mapping from NAICS 2007 to SIC 1987 here: http://www.census.gov/epcd/naics02/N02TOS87.HTM.

Trade union: Strike action

2009-11-09T06:28:29.0013Z

I'd like to model which Trade Unions were participant/organisers of various strike action events. How about a new property on trade union, strikes, linking to a new type, Strike action? Strike action would include event.

To Do Lists: Sorted List

2009-11-07T07:28:01.0006Z

When I had a quick play with it, I was getting page timeouts, not query timeouts, which is why I suggested it would have to be some type of AJAXy type solution, so you could get the page returned before the timeout, but still updated it afterwards. Doubt it's worth the effort though.

Job title: SIC Codes

2009-11-07T00:44:31.0013Z

oh lovely, I got error messages so I tried again, but it posted anyway. oh well

Job title: SIC Codes

2009-11-07T00:43:52.0000Z

SIC Codes refer to Industry, not job title. And Industry is based on NAICS mostly, since that is the newer classification code system.

Job title: SIC Codes

2009-11-07T00:43:17.0013Z

SIC Codes refer to Industry, not job title. And Industry is based on NAICS mostly, since that is the newer classification code system.

Job title: SIC Codes

2009-11-07T00:42:59.0013Z

SIC Codes refer to Industry, not job title. And Industry is based on NAICS mostly, since that is the newer classification code system.

Business: New type: trade union

2009-11-07T00:14:35.0018Z

FYI, I just created a new Trade Union type in this domain. It's quite simple, and just links to industries and professions which the union represents. There are reciprocal links from each of those types back to the union. Trade union also includes organization and employer.

To Do Lists: Sorted List

2009-11-06T20:20:40.0006Z

Yeah, I really wish that estimate-count degraded a little more gracefully. I've written other apps where I wrap the return:count in a try-catch and then run return:estimate-count if it times-out. But this app is already slow and I'm not sure how much further I can push it.

To Do Lists: Sorted List

2009-11-06T17:37:49.0013Z

There's an even more egregious example than the one I noticed. #1 on the hit parade is Shawn's http://www.freebase.com/view/user/narphorium/default_domain/views/books_with_edition_in_their_name which is listed with 2.4 million entries, but is actually empty.

I had a quick look at the code and it looks like the root of the problem is the use of MQL's 'estimate-count.' It returns wildly inaccurate results, but using 'count' instead causes things to time out, so I'm not sure there is a good solution. I could envision a solution that used AJAX with a dynamically updated display that fell back from 'count' to 'estimate-count' when necessary, but that seems way too much work.

Business: Local or alternative currency?

2009-11-06T14:10:23.0027Z

OK, just seen the discussion on the mailling list - and that you were referring to community currencies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Community_currencies

Business: Local or alternative currency?

2009-11-06T12:12:00.0013Z

I like the idea, but it might be complex. I know a lot of currencies are fixed at a consistent exchange rate to the US dollar, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the dollar is accepted currency in anyway. Also the black market requirement for the Euro or US$ doesn't necessarily mean it is an alternative currency in any official business. Do you know of any examples of countries with officially recognised multiple currencies?

Where I am the fuel stations will accept payment in most currencies of neighbouring countries, but most shops will only accept the local currency. Hotels sometimes accept US dollars, but most payments are local currency. It varies depending on the business and the demographics of their customers, so no hard or fast rule or official support.

To Do Lists: Sorted List

2009-11-06T02:18:03.0013Z

Something is screwy with one of the lists. When I look at http://www.freebase.com/view/user/tfmorris/default_domain/views/people_with_with_in_their_names it lists 26 people, but on the sorted lists index it says 635. Not sure what the deal is...

To Do Lists: Sorted List

2009-11-05T20:34:08.0001Z

I've put together a quick Acre app to show all the To Do lists ordered by number of topics. I hope you find it useful as a way to monitor which tasks require the most attention. Views without any topics are not shown.

If you want to see a list of tasks created by a specific user you can use the following URL format http://todo.narphorium.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/user/sprocketonline

Business: Local or alternative currency?

2009-11-05T06:56:37.0018Z

It would be good to capture local or alternative currencies. Should the currency type be applied to those? Should a new type be created as well, or alternatively? If yes, would it belong in Business commons or somewhere else?