Publishing

China: Medal Count by Country

2008-08-19T17:01:42.0027Z

Here's a query to see the 2008 Olympic medal count according to Freebase.

Tiger Woods: Championships

2008-08-19T15:47:42.0032Z

I added his Masters Tournament wins in here. As a result, he was typed as a sports team. Is there a better way to enter in individual sports championships?

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-16T10:49:17.0005Z

I would like all of the readers to please contribute in your comments whether President Musharraf should resign or should he be punished for his deeds and acts and thrown away from his position.

Please comment what and why ???

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-08T17:27:45.0000Z

It could also address local vs. national editions (like the NY Times), which might be interesting to some people. I'll add a task for myself in the old refactoring queue.

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T23:47:38.0012Z

I was thinking something like that, where we combined the fields into one.

And I had no idea there were papers that still did morning/evening editions!

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T22:59:52.0012Z

That would also help modeling papers with morning and evening editions (the Providence Journal-Bulletin had this until very recently).

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-07T18:54:35.0012Z

Good point. The issue then is how to model things like price and circulation in a way that accomodates weekly papers as well as those that have both daily and sunday editions. We could do a CVT with value, date, and frequency (or maybe call it edition?). Papers with only one edition could optionally leave frequency blank, I suppose. Any other thoughts?

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-06T18:15:37.0010Z

Can we remove the "daily" specific nature of the Newspaper Type so we can use this for weeklies?

You Can't Take It with You: Yes, please split

2008-08-05T17:21:17.0017Z

Azriel Graeber: Re: A. Graeber

2008-07-31T02:30:55.0012Z

He IS a renaissance man.

Role-playing game: Topic Merge

2008-07-29T14:31:26.0017Z

Role-playing games are called RPGs for short. It's an acronym, not sure why someone created another article to talk about the same thing.

The Butcher Boy: Split

2008-07-28T23:20:16.0018Z

Split book from movie

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T21:30:32.0012Z

Thanks !

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T20:33:59.0012Z

For a start, see the help topic Entering Scholarly Works and Citations. The short answer is that an article should have the types Scholarly Work, Written Work, and Published Work. Between these, you should be able to enter most of the properties you mention.

Publishing: Pubmed Article

2008-07-28T19:57:22.0017Z

An article in pubmed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ) can be defined by a journal (issn, abbreviation, title) , an issue ( volume, issue, date ) , a title, a pubmed identidier (pmid) , a doi , a list of authors. I'm lost in all those types. Dear Lazyweb, hat are the types that should be used to create a new instance of an article ?

Thanks

Pierre

Stephen Colbert: Stephen Colbert for President

2008-07-25T19:06:10.0000Z

flippity floo!

A Darkness at Sethanon: A Darkness at Sethanon

2008-07-25T09:38:41.0017Z

Plz remove this: A Darkness at Sethanon . because it is aaready created with full detail.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-07-24T23:20:13.0005Z

Spurred on by an aside that spatialed made in some discussion post awhile back (I can't locate the post), I'm considering revising the way that we model journal issues. Currently, each issue has its own topic, which links to both the journal and the articles contained in that issue. (See
http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/book/journal_issue) The main problems with this format are that it is cumbersome to enter data, and also that most bibliographic sources are concerned primarily with the article and the journal, relegating the issue to a series of strings (volume, issue, date). This latter issue might make integration with standard bibliographic schemas a bit cumbersome, although it wouldn't be insurmountable.

As an experiment, though, I thought I'd try to see what a model that eliminated the issue type entirely looked like. Here are the results:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008cd1edd.

I've replaced the issue type with a CVT that connects the article and the journal, and includes the standard bibliographic data of Volume, issue, date, issue date extra, and pages ("issue date extra" is something I had to make up for journals that aren't published on a schedule that translates into mm/dd/yyyy). Journal articles have both Scholarly Work and Written Work as included types, although a journal article can also be a review, editorial, letter or other type of writing.

The only real disadvantage that I see to this is that constructing the contents of a given issue will be harder -- users will have to query on a combination of several fields (volume, issue, etc.) to find what they're looking for.

I'd love to hear what people think about this. If it seems to work, I might do the same thing for newspaper issues.

This is also being discussed on the data-modelers mailing list: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/2008-July/000989.html

International Affairs: Split

2008-07-24T22:49:16.0010Z

The field of study should be split from the journal.

Azriel Graeber: Re: A. Graeber

2008-07-22T19:09:27.0007Z

well when its someone like A.Graeber, you dont have to wonder too hard. He's feats are pretty pretty pretty impressive.i mean milk machine, PhD, published writer, all around renaissance man, all-around renaissance man.

Publishing: "Genre" as properties of "Book" and "Short Story"

2008-07-22T18:35:33.0007Z

I think that about covers it.

Azriel Graeber: Re: A. Graeber

2008-07-22T04:59:01.0007Z

It's the same Azriel Graeber who invented the milking machine that has a PhD in Genealogy?

It kind of makes you wonder how one person can accomplish so much?

Publishing: "Genre" as properties of "Book" and "Short Story"

2008-07-21T19:57:15.0007Z

It does seem silly that some short stories have "short story" as a genre. Feel free to delete those assertions. Poems have genres, but those are pretty much already handled by the "verse form" propety. Plays have their own genre type. What other types of written works do you think have genres (that aren't already covered by an existing type)?

Publishing: "Genre" as properties of "Book" and "Short Story"

2008-07-17T01:04:29.0012Z

I'm curious why "Genre" is not a property of the type "Written Work" but exists separately under both "Book" and "Short Story" (though not "Poem").

It seems silly that some short stories have the genre of "Short Story", which would make more sense if tagged on the more generic "Written Work" instead.

Azriel Graeber: Re: A. Graeber

2008-07-16T00:10:10.0007Z

i cant think of the name either,but no i think this is the Azriel Graeber that has a PhD in Genealogy and Cemeterial Studies. i hear he's coming out with a book on methods of research, should be fantastic

Azriel Graeber: Re: A. Graeber

2008-07-15T22:38:35.0005Z

Is this Azriel Graeber the same person of that name who invented that machine to facilitate the milking of cows? I forgot what it's called.

Written Work: Subjects

2008-07-08T18:59:15.0012Z

"Subjects" is pretty much wide open; do what you will.

Written Work: Subjects

2008-07-08T01:11:25.0005Z

Are the "subjects" of a written work restricted to subjects that are addressed in a non-fictional manner, or can e.g. Octavia Butler's biology-focused SF works have a "subject" of biology?

Publishing: editor in chief for periodicals?

2008-06-27T22:40:07.0000Z

Most periodicals should also be typed as Employer. The intent was that editorial staff could be entered there.

Publishing: editor in chief for periodicals?

2008-06-27T17:07:45.0012Z

I don't see a editor in chief or executive editor in any of the newspaper, magazine or periodicals. May I suggest a field be introduced if none exists?

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-11T05:48:28.0009Z

That might help but I doubt it will ever be as intuitive or as used as author, publication date, publisher, editor, etc. Written work is a very basic type that is almost always co-typed. Adding a such a non-essential property to it just seems wrong to me.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T19:09:11.0000Z

Ed: upthread a bit, you mention that the property "school or movement" is not immediately intuitive. I think this may be the root of the problem. Coming from a literature background, it seems obvious to me. But it just occurred to me that from the standpoint of academic or scholarly writing "school" is a pretty ambiguous term. Maybe we should try to come up with a better name, and see how that looks.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T18:15:06.0007Z

I think you overestimate the utility of hiding unused values. In viewing one, you view all. Further, you don't get information for a property until you start to edit it. Further still, in terms of types, the relevance manager does a lot of the work by narrowing down types. For properties you need to look at and interpret them all. You could probably develop a "functionality" distribution curve based on the number of properties for any given type. How many is too many? There will be a too many. I'm thinking about usability too.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T07:57:36.0007Z

The only reason for moving date and place of death to a new Deceased Person type was that, especially in the old UI, it was extremely creepy to look at an instance of a person with those values just sitting there… waiting… empty… hungry for a value… The semantic value of a separate type was a much more minor point.

Especially given that the new UI hides unused values unless one really wants to fill them in, and given the comparative difficulty of figuring out which type needs to be added to facilitate using a particular desired property, proliferating types is really not useful. Sure, it may be more purely semantically clean—and I’m quite the sucker for that argument—but the usability is paramount.

Further, in this specific case, every piece of writing can be said to be in a school or movement, even the driest of non-fiction. So go ahead and, as you say, load it up!

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T03:07:23.0000Z

Welcome to the party Faye! I take your point but I still don't agree.

The deceased person type approach seems like a good one to me, although I might have kept the death date on Person because all people die. I can certainly understand the case for a Deceased_person type with associated properties but I can't understand why that case is perceived differently than Work_of_literary_school. I think the case is stronger for that type to be a separate one and not Deceased person.

The TV_program example is the same in that I would use an end date on the program type and possibly a "Cancelled_program" property or type for the details. Programs, like people, all have end dates no matter how good they are (see The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.). The details of the ending are tangential.

I would probably add spin-offs as a property of TV_program because the property is so intuitive and simple, even though spin-offs are not as common/universal as children and siblings. Plus, the potential for siblings, children and spin-offs is always present even if through adoption and/or nostalgia.

A "None" value could be used for siblings, children and spin-offs without asking the user to look up what they mean. The same can't really be said for Literary school/movement.

If you still don't agree, maybe I should start looking for other possible but not always relevant properties of written work so we can really load it up!? ;)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-10T01:05:13.0007Z

Grrr, my super-unsupported internal discussion RSS died last Wednesday, and I can't believe I missed this discussion (kicking myself)!

As the person who asked for the property "Poetic/Literary School or Movement", Ed, I have to say I agree with Jeff. It's just not possible to normalize types and properties in such a way that all instances of a type have values for all of its properties.

Now we do try to factor out the rather silly or morbid cases. For example, having a "Date of Death" property on type Person for people still alive just seemed wrong, so the Deceased Person type was, uhm, born. But this logic is applied on a case-by-case basis.

If you take a look at the TV Program type, you'll see that there's a "air date of final episode" property. We could've created a similar "Canceled TV Program" type for that and separate it from the TV Program type, but then why stop there? The type also has "Spin-offs" and "Spun off from" properties, but since most programs don't ever achieve the kind of requisite popularity to have or be a spin-off, why not spin off those properties to form new types that only the most successful programs get cotyped with?

And BTW, since I'm an only child, I reject the fact that Person has a "Siblings" property that I can never fill out. Why isn't it moved out to a more appropriate "People with Siblings" type? You see where I'm going with this. :)

(Off to find more discussions I missed last week, grrr...)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T23:07:29.0000Z

Er, yeah, that's what I meant!

Agreed, no workable model will have 100% of properties applicable to all instances. However, this one just seems really particular to a sub-group, not the whole.

Using the spouse/partner example, that property is immediately intuitive and has potential to be applicable to any instance. I don't think either of those traits apply to literary school/movement.

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T22:09:47.0007Z

I don't think it's possible to create a workable model in which 100% of properties on a type would always be applicable to 100% of possible instances. I note, for example, think we're not having this conversation about the property "spouse (or domestic partner)" on the "person" type, even though that property is not applicable to people who have never been married. Is your argument that there are too many types of written works and authors for which the "literary movement" properties can't apply? (Scientific journal articles, textbooks, technical manuals, most reference books, most reviews, most newspaper reportage all spring to mind.)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T19:09:43.0000Z

I respectfully disagree. If a property does not apply to all instances of the type then I don't think it should belong on the type. A new type should be created that is co-typed with the first one and includes the additional properties. Otherwise, the sticking point you mention will result in unnecessary and aggregative errors. There should be no need to define "many".

A "Written work of literary movement" type that is co-typed with "Written work" and adds the literary movement property makes a lot more sense to me than forcing users to figure out whether or not their topic(s) meets the requirements to be attributed by any given property of an otherwise appropriate type. It's tough enough trying to figure out which type to use! :)

Literary School Or Movement: Request: Remove links from Author and Written work

2008-06-09T17:46:07.0000Z

I moved this to "written work" and "author" from "poem" and "poet" because it was silly to constrain movements to poetic movements. And I was a bit hesitant to put them on written work and author because the types are so all-encompassing. But I do worry that creating "member of literary movement" and "work belonging to literary movement" types would be worse. It's pretty trivial to leave properties blank. It's rather more work to add a new type to get a property, since you have to know that you need to do so (although the publishing domain is chock full of these already, I admit).

Properties do not need to be applicable to all instances of a type to be on a type; they just need to be applicable to many of the topics (the definition of "many", of course, being the sticking point). And a significant number of poems, plays, fiction, essays, and certain types of prose non-fiction could be said to belong to a school or movement.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-29T21:33:49.0007Z

OK, looks good. :)

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-29T06:51:52.0000Z

Sounds like something that'd be easier to visualize once it's filled out on the board. I'll come by tomorrow.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-28T20:23:06.0007Z

What do you think of the proposed "Edition series" --> "Book" --> "Book edition" model? Especially if we can come up with a less ambiguous name than "edition series"?

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-28T19:47:27.0007Z

Yes, there is a huge difference between the various editions of the first edition of Compilers and the various editions of the second edition of Compilers. But the "hardcover CD-rom package" edition ("binding", really) of the Compilers, 2nd edition, still has a much closer relationship to the original Compilers book than does say, David Flanagan's Java in a Nutshell. Modeling this relationship is of interest to me.

As you said, two definitions exist for "edition", one is used to describe more or less binding, the other is used to describe content. We have the schema to model the first case, I propose we come up with a schema to model the second case.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-28T19:00:05.0000Z

Faye, would you describe the hardcover and paperback editions of the first edtion of Compilers as having the same relationship to each other as to the hardcover edition of the second edition of Compilers? Because I don't think they do. The hardcover and paperback are just different bindings of more-or-less the same content; the hardcover of the 2nd ed. is a binding of a volume containing different content.

We're not actually redefining "book edition" at all. What the model does is specify one of two common meanings for "book edition". The relevant definitions are (courtesy of the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.): "The form in which a publication is issued: a paperback edition of a novel; an annotated edition of Shakespeare." and "A version of an earlier publication having substantial changes or additions: a newly revised edition of a standard reference work." The type Book Edition was designed with the first definition in mind; you (understandably) want to use it for the second.

Hanging translations off a Book Edition is certainly possible, but which of the three editions of the original edition of Compilers would you hang the translation off of?

I like Ed's idea of treating books with multiple editions (of the second sort) as a series. I'm not sure about the name -- I think "book edition series" gets us into the same trap that "book edition" is doing. I would expect something called "book edition series" to collect instances of the type Book Edition (like the Harvard Library or Norton Critical Editions); but I don't know what else to call something that collects instances of the type Book that were published in serial editions.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-28T17:56:58.0000Z

I rather like that idea, edition series.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-28T02:29:34.0000Z

Books with multiple editions are somewhat analogous to Motorcycle series, which are one of the most common Wikipedia motorcycle subjects. A motorcycle series is a grouping of the same motorcycle body styles of the same motorcycle model over multiple model years (e.g., Harley-Davidson XL1200N, BWM F650 CS). Motorcycle series can even be nested (e.g., the Honda CBR series includes many subseries). I found that series was often used to provide a consistent name for a group of motorcycles that were thought of as a collective but not identical. Maybe a book_edition_series type could be used with a property of "Book editions within this series"? This would allow Compilers to be a topic with properties that describe the entire series including links to the various Compilers book editions.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-28T01:53:59.0000Z

I was all but convinced, but now that I've given this a little more thought, I have to admit that modeling Book Editions as Books still bothers me.

First, the more philosophical argument: I think of the second edition of the Compilers book as the second edition of the Compilers book because it is, as we say even now, the second edition of the Compilers book. When we redefine common terms like "book" and "book edition" (completely disregarding M-W's many wonderful editions of their hot-selling dictionary) to accommodate a "special case", we introduce an extra hurdle in the learning curve new users must overcome before they can enter quality data. Perhaps not so bad that one can't shrug it off as I was tempted to do, but nonetheless it seems forced, sloppy, compromised, and resigned to having to live with data and schema that are...incongruent -- and I don't mean that as a criticism but just a reflection on the fact that no neat little boxes of Types, no matter how thoughtfully constructed with perfectly curved-out included typed and supporting types and cotype usage, can accommodate the myriad varieties of real-world data that's beautiful and complicated and convoluted at the same time and oh God I've become Mark Morford. I do ponder the cumulative effect of these counter-intuitive "special cases." Maybe it's just me, but I can't seem to go a week on Freebase without running into these "special cases". :)

Then again, it also seems intuitive to me, at least after mulling over the Compilers book data, that translations should be at the Book Edition level. David Flanagan's "Java in a Nutshell" has gone through 5 editions in the last 10 years. If I'm looking for a translated version, I'm definitely going to make sure it's of the 5th edition. Does that mean we model every book edition (that belongs to a book with at least one other edition with different content) that has an associated translation as a separate book? I'm confused.

Oh, and how does one reconnect the severed link between a book's multiple editions when they are modeled each as a separate book? Looking at each edition as a book, how do I know if other editions exist?

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-27T23:53:23.0007Z

These are some of the thoughts that make think it makes more sense to model it as two books. The original version of Compilers was published in at least six editions, including three translations. All these editions have a similar relationship to the original (three-author) Compilers. But I don't think they have the same relationship to the four-author version. Taking this further, I think it's quite useful to be able to say which edition the translations are made from. If we combine the two editions at the Book level, it is impossible to know which version the translation is of, which might be valuable to know, especially for a hypothetical work that might have had translations made of multiple editions.

Another analogy is dictionaries. I have a hard time thinking of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition as being the same book as Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2nd Edition, say.

But I do agree that to a certain extent, we're dealing with Theseus' paradox, and any solution is likely to be idiosyncratic. (Even WorldCat, which conflates all of the various types of editions of Compilers as editions of a single work, only conflates the various versions of the 10th and 11th eds. of the M-W Collegiate Dict.)

You can perform an end-run around it, though. You could simply not create a Book topic for the book, and just have individual Book Editions, each linked to the appropriate authors.

Publishing: Different authors between book editions

2008-05-27T23:31:06.0000Z

Souldn't each edition be a new book? I can think of many examples when different editions of textbooks have different authors or editors. There are often different cover artists and even publishers. A similar argument could be made for printings if the cover, forward, etc. have changed.