People

People: Type "Family" needs a property for members

2008-08-27T23:20:54.0012Z

Reciprocation from the Person type isn't necessary.

However, there's nothing linking a Person instance with a Family instance, and that link needs to be made before anything can be deduced or read off the page.

Most current instances of the Family type are royal houses or ruling dynasties, but who are the members of the House of Windsor, for example? For each family, membership may be by bloodline, or by patrilineal or matrilineal descent only. It'd be much easier to tally up the members than to try to figure them out logically.

People: Type "Family" needs a property for members

2008-08-27T22:52:29.0012Z

Should the property be reciprocated onto "person"? I'd say not, since the majority of people don't belong to families that are going to merit inclusion here. The broader question is whether this type serves any purpose -- couldn't the relevant information be gotten from parent/child/spouse/sibling values?

People: Type "Family" needs a property for members

2008-08-01T23:10:53.0017Z

Hi,

Please add a "Members" property to type "Family" for listing prominent members of that family. ETC /people/person.

Person: Relationships

2008-07-25T00:25:57.0012Z

Another long delay - I need to remember to login in more than once a month (or figure out how to get RSS feeds set up).

I guess the real answer to whether the accuracy is needed depends on whether Freebase has aspirations to hold genealogical data. The current scheme isn't adequate for anything genealogical, including medical applications which need genealogical information.

I tend to lean towards the "if you're going to do it, you should do it right" camp, but I recognize that that often leads to over engineering. I don't know anything about how Freebase stores things internally, so it's difficult to evaluate where the "quadrupling" comes in and how big an impact it has in real world terms.

On the other hand, no one's addressed the sibling side of the argument. That could clearly be derived from traversing the parent-child graph as well, yet it seems to have been important enough to record separately (and redundantly).

That's enough lobbying for me though. If anyone ever decides to change the decision, ping me and I'll provide pointers to how things are modeled in the genealogical data world.

Person: Relationships

2008-06-23T20:03:38.0012Z

It’s less a decision to obscure the facts as a lack of a compelling use case for a more complicated model. The current model is simple and handles 95% of the use cases. To complicate the parent-child relationship—quadrupling the amount of information needed to represent it, in even the simplest cases—really needs a compelling use case. The blurb can tell human consumers that Gerald Ford was adopted. Is there a need for API-based applications to be able to make that distinction?

Person: Naming

2008-06-23T19:58:15.0000Z

As with many such issues, there is a trade-off between the use cases and completeness. Having proper sorting, name semantics, etc., would all be very cool, but (a) where would we get this data, and (b) who would use it? These are not rhetorical questions; if there is a large store of such data and an interested user community, then it is worth figuring out the answers to these questions.
We could get sorting information from Wikipedia, as category inclusions often include that, and from MusicBrainz, which includes it for all musical artists. Is it worthwhile? How would we model it—as an additional text field, like alias?
Is there a large database of genealogical information that is reconcilable with Wikipedia and of general public interest? Does it have well-structured name information?

Person: Relationships

2008-06-20T19:52:15.0001Z

I just discovered this reply after many months. Sorry for the delay!

In my opinion the privacy concerns are orthogonal and are a red herring here. The participants can believe whatever they want, but biological parents and adoptive parents are undeniably different relationships.

The decision to obscure the facts which our displayed for living people who aren't public personas shouldn't prevent getting the data accurate in the first place. That's not possible with the current schema.

Take a look a Gerry Ford http://freebase.com/view/en/gerald_ford?pid=%2Fpeople%2Fperson%2Fparents. Leaving aside the fact that his grandfather is also listed as a "parent" (apparently the work of mw_template_bot), how would you accurately model his family using the current schema? How would you tell his adoptive parents from his biological parents? How would you tell which female parent went with which male parent? Would all the half-brothers and half-sisters just get linked together in one big undifferentiated pile of "siblings?"

Person: Naming

2008-06-20T19:34:13.0000Z

It would be worth reviewing the practices in the field of genealogy. Doing this in a culturally comprehensive way is non-trivial. Surname or family name and given name are more culturally neutral terms, but you also need to deal with ruf names http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_name, dit names http://www.francogene.com/quebec/ditnames.php, other kinds of aliases (e.g. "William Smith alias Jones") , etc.

In addition to all the names a person used personally, they may also have been called different names in different languages or cultures (e.g. Charlemagne vs Carolus Magnus) where it is useful to have the name tagged with the language.

Person: Privacy concerns

2008-06-20T19:22:30.0000Z

Change banks. Seriously! Your bank has indicated that they really don't care about the security of your money or your personal information. Information like this is widely available from sources other than Freebase.

If you're going to keep the same bank, just lie. They don't care that you said your mother's maiden Deep Azure Blue or Rugby Union. They're just going to check that the response to the challenge matches what you gave them originally (of course that does somewhat defeat the mnemonic value of using easy to remember challenges).

For the more general question of personal data, the approach used by things like WorldConnect (wc.rootsweb.com) is a good starting point. Don't publish personal data on people who are still alive (unless they are a public persona).

People: How about Professional Association?

2008-06-12T02:55:33.0000Z

Organization is a type located in the organization domain.

People: How about Professional Association?

2008-06-12T00:26:42.0036Z

I'm sorry. I did not see the category, if that is the correct term, of organization associated with the category "person." Or at least I don't remember seeing it.

Can you put me straight on where to find it?

Thanks, Dennis

People: How about Professional Association?

2008-06-09T20:27:47.0007Z

Dennis, I think this is best modeled by the Organization and Organization member types. Menino’s leadership, on the other hand, of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, would be modeled as having a board position in that organization, specifically that of Chair or President or whatever they call it.

People: How about Professional Association?

2008-06-09T02:09:09.0005Z

Hey, what's up?

What about a category or type for "Professional Association?" For example, politican Thomas Menino, Mayor of Boston, used to be the head of the United States Conference of Mayors. Where does that info fit?

Perhaps that would be better expressed as "Political Alliance?"

"Professional Association" could refer to some one belonging to the "Association for the Promotion of Web 2.0" of some such...

Thoughts?

Thanks, Dennis

Ethnicity: Ethnicity ?

2008-05-23T07:31:01.0005Z

'French people', 'European', etc... this is not Ethnicity this is nationality. In genetics, only a few items are used 'Caucasian', 'African', 'Asian' ... and even here, that doesn't mean much things.

Person: Why do some relationships return a null "name".

2008-05-02T21:16:40.0000Z

The discussion fora are a fine place to ask questions. I don’t know if the discussion about Person is the best place for this question, but it’s fine.

The thing attached to the “Spouse (or domestic partner)” property is not a Person, but rather a Marriage. The Marriage is a compound value type connecting two (or more) Persons, as well as other information such as the start and end of the marriage. Since the Marriage CVT doesn’t have a name on its own, the simple form of the query doesn’t have anything to display.

You can try this instead:

"spouse_s" : [ { "id" : null } ]

to find the marriage itself, or:

"spouse_s" : [ { "spouse" : [] } ]

to find the participants in the marriage. The problem with that latter approach is that since the Person from which you’re starting is in the marriage, you will see him or her again; for instance, from Bill Clinton, you will find that his marriage includes Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

CVTs are a powerful design pattern in Freebase, but can be a little tricky to use. The help topic linked above should be of some help.

Person: Why do some relationships return a null "name".

2008-05-02T20:17:00.0012Z

(n00b question, might be wrong forum, sorry in advance, pointers in the correct direction appreciated, etc.)

Anyways, why do some relationships return a null name field? For example, spouse_s, sibling_s, etc. That is, for a query such as the following, the name field comes back null.

{
"query" : {
    "/people/person/spouse_s" : [
      {}
    ],
    "id" : "/en/bill_clinton"
}
}

(yes, I know...insert Bill Clinton joke here)

But I can get Chelsea's name from a similar query for /people/person/children. This seems to imply that I need to get the guid from this query, and re-query for information on Bill's spouse (and siblings, and some others that seem to return a guid+null name)

Person: Isn't this a treatment of human persons?

2008-04-22T23:54:55.0000Z

Most dictionaries define "person" as a human being, for what that's worth. My impression is people (defined as "humans using Freebase" for purposes of this post) will understand what is implied by the type "person". Naming the type "human" seems, well, impersonal to me. But maybe I'm not familiar enough with the arguments you're alluding to. What other types of things might it be confused with?

Person: Isn't this a treatment of human persons?

2008-04-22T23:18:24.0012Z

There's some room for argument as to whether only humans should be persons? Perhaps something more like Humans, rather than Persons would be slightly more accurate/appropriate?

Person: Height and Weight

2008-03-31T19:07:13.0005Z

This is a good point, but is kind of related to the general question of time-varying properties. For now, they should be the present height and weight, if known, or the most relevant (per community consensus, e.g. an athlete’s height and weight at the peak of their career) otherwise.

We are working on the general challenge of varying properties.

Person: Height and Weight

2008-03-30T03:43:34.0012Z

I don't think that height and weight should be included in person's properties as they are highly variable and can not be easily fixed to particular event or age of that person.

Person: Signature?

2008-03-29T06:55:11.0000Z

yogi

Person: When the ties break asunder...

2008-03-24T18:50:26.0007Z

We actually had a property for this once-upon-a-time, but it seems it was deleted. I think it's interesting data, too.

Person: Handedness?

2008-03-24T18:16:17.0005Z

What do y'all think about adding Handedness (Left, Right, Ambidextrous) to Person? There are many data sources out there to start populating it, e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_left-handed_people

http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/left.html

Person: When the ties break asunder...

2008-03-23T19:38:38.0012Z

Should we capture the announced, official or legal reasons for a marriage's end? I guess it would be less certain for the unofficialized unions such as domestic partnership.

Just mourning the end to yet another beautiful celebrity relationship But I think at the least it would be interesting to have the various historically significant anullments, divorces, and estrangements captured and searchable. Henry VIII and Catherine's breakup certainly had a tremendous impact on history.

Catherine of Aragon m. 1509 - 1533 Divorced	Anne Boleyn m. 1533 - 1536 Executed	Jane Seymour m. 1536 - 1537 Died
Anne of Cleves m. 1540 Jan. - July Divorced	Kathryn Howard m. 1540 - 1542 Executed	Katherine Parr m. 1543 - 1547 Widowed

Person: Privacy concerns

2008-03-05T20:14:08.0012Z

Crossposted from the data-modeling mailing list...

A while ago I signed up for online banking and, as online banking systems tend to do, it asked me not only for a password but for some additional question/answer pairs to help me sort things out if I lost or forgot that password. I looked at the list of suggested questions, and saw things like:

- Mother's maiden name
- Your high school's mascot
- Town where you were born

It occurred to me that almost every item on that list of questions was something that you could find in Freebase, if a person's properties were filled in completely. As you can imagine, this could be a bit scary if someone used the information in FB to login to your online banking.

When you sign up for Freebase you get a "user profile" and then there's a field to link it to a "Person topic about me". That person topic then lets you fill in your mother's maiden name, your high school, the town where you were born, and so forth. I suspect that some people do this a bit naively, hardly thinking about how it could be used for identity theft. (None of *us*, of course! Me, I filled in my mother's maiden name in the full and complete knowledge that the world can use it to access to my bank statements ;))

But now my mother and father have nodes in Freebase, and what's to stop someone coming along and filling in *their* mother's maiden names, high schools, etc? Or for that matter, points that might be sensitive for various reasons, like "weight" or "religion"?

So there's been a bit of discussion around the place about changing the "Person" topic to be less privacy-invading, and moving some of the properties to a new type called "Public person", which we can use for well-known public figures and famous people whose privacy is, let's face it, already pretty well invaded. That way we can record the weight of professional athletes or celebrities with eating disorders, or the religion of Presidents of the USA, or the genealogy of historical figures, without doing the same to ordinary people like you or me.

If we did this, we'd probably then go through and type anyone who has a Wikipedia article as a "public person" for starters. If they meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, then their birthdates and so forth are probably public knowledge anyway. Also, we'd need to write a FAQ or guideline somewhere about what makes someone a public person, and when you should (or shouldn't) apply that type.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

Person: Relationships

2008-02-22T21:46:18.0007Z

People may assume that the biological parent is intended, but the participants in most adoptive relationships prefer to have their relationship assumed to be equivalent to (if not identical to) a biological one. This is really a sort of privacy questions; the fact that you or I were or were not adopted is not of general public interest; the fact that Nicole Richie or Pax Jolie-Pitt are adopted is of broader public interest. This will probably be addressed in the near future by a division of the Person type into public and private sub-types.

Person: Relationships

2008-02-22T20:32:49.0007Z

In the absence of any qualifiers, people are going to assume that "parent" means biological parent. It would definitely be useful to have adoptive relationships (with dates) included as well. The two types of information are both useful. As was pointed out, for some types of research (e.g. medical/genetic) only biological relationships are important.

On the opposite side of things, the "sibling" relationship seems undesirable to have stored explicitly since it can be derived from the other primary relationships.

People: Education

2008-02-15T22:08:37.0007Z

That’s a good question, Gordon. It’s not something easy to structure; in some sense, the most accurate fix might be to change the property name to “Formal Education.” We could add the School of Hard Knocks or what have you as institutions… This is strongly related, if not identical, to the general problem of negative assertions, such as the infamous promiscuous polymorphous polymath None.

People: Education

2008-02-15T20:09:51.0012Z

Should we capture the datum that someone is self-educated? Informal education? Would the Education Property be modified to allow non-standard education processes outside of the standard Collegiate system?

Here's an example from our pal Wikipedia:

"Giambattista della Porta spent the majority of his life on scientific endeavors. He benefited from an informal education of tutors and visits from renowned scholars..."

2007-09-16T21:08:49.0007Z

I agree with Etan. People can be born into or out of wedlock, and their parents may get married at some later date. If you know who a person’s parents are and you know their birthday, you can then make inferences based on marriages of the parents, but that’s about the best you can do.

A stronger argument for mediators is handling adoptive relationships as well as or instead of biological ones. That gets complicated.

Person: Relationships

2007-09-16T15:36:00.0007Z

All we need are topics for the persons and the unmediated links between them. Starting with the information about Person-1, a user finds that Person-1 has a child, Person-2. The user can then discover the other recorded parents of Person-2 by examining the information about Person-2, in which information the user finds that Person-2 has a parent, Person-3 . What advantages do mediators offer in cases of this sort?

Person: Signature?

2007-09-06T22:08:31.0000Z

test

People: Making Religion an enumerated list?

2007-08-01T00:54:20.0007Z

Yeah...I was afraid you would say that. I guess there's no way to avoid gardening. I've de-typed several things including "Aircraft" and the Song "Undecided" as a Religion, and was looking for ways to avoid it.

May I request the administrators to add a Property Description to the Religion property to guide users? "Examples: Jainism, Roman Catholicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Evangelicalism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism..."

People: Making Religion an enumerated list?

2007-08-01T00:34:21.0007Z

I really don’t think that would be feasible.

Accidentally-created religion names should be added as aliases (“Jewish” for “Judaism”) but attempting to enumerate religions is only going to lead down a rathole.

People: Making Religion an enumerated list?

2007-08-01T00:29:54.0011Z

Hi, given that there's really just a handful of major religions in the world and I think they're all in Freebase, how would the administrators of the People domain feel about making the Religion property of the Person type display as an enumerated list? It would cut down on errors creating new Religions by mistake, simply because users are new to autocomplete. One example is a new user-created Religion titled "Jewish" while expected behavior would be to select "Judaism" from the list supplied by autocomplete.

Of course it does make creating new Religions harder, but I think there should be little need to do so assuming we've got all the Religions here (note: not meant to be taken as social commentary). ;) Users can always go to the Religion domain and enter new topics there. The goal is to avoid unintentional mistakes due to confusion regarding autocomplete. What do you think?

People: Mythological systems

2007-06-22T01:05:36.0006Z

Hi, a lot of mythological figures were worshiped as gods and goddesses in Ancient Greece and Rome, and to a lesser degree, still are. Now that we have a Religion domain, those figures can be typed Deities:

http://www.freebase.com/view/filter?id=/religion/deity

People: Topic About Me

2007-06-04T19:45:26.0011Z

A lot of people are using the "Topic About Me" property in their user profile to link to articles about things they generally identify with (professions, ideas, sports, etc.), creating a lot of mis-typed People topics. I think "Me on Freebase" or "Me as a Topic" would be a better name to discourage this behavior. Maybe also adding an "Interests" field would give people a place to put the more general topics they want to link themselves to.

People: Mythological systems

2007-05-18T03:00:20.0011Z

This is probably not the right place to ask this question, but I could not find a domain which seemed appropriate for this. I have a couple of types - Mythological figures, Mythological Systems - which I've been using to disambiguate topics like "Paris (City)" and "Paris (Mythological Figure)". Would this need a separate domain? None of the existing ones seem appropriate.

People: Getting my bearings

2007-05-03T20:58:56.0006Z

Then I'll stop tinkering in there for now.

People: Getting my bearings

2007-05-03T20:42:47.0006Z

We're currently developing a new domain for religion, with a number of new types and a new model - it should be visible sometime in the next week.

We'll definitely need some help filling it out once it's up, so I'll drop a note on your profile page when it's ready. Thanks for the interest!

People: Getting my bearings

2007-05-03T20:00:21.0012Z

I've edited a few things in the Religion type, as has someone else. I'm trying to clear some things up for myself:

Should topics be limited to specific religions, or should it include descriptions of religions? For example, there is currently a "Monotheism" and "Abrahamic Religion" topics, which aren't religions, but a description. I'm wondering if that might be better as a property?

I would be happy to admin this type if necessary.