Publishing

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-04T18:09:52.0012Z

If Jounal Article were linked directly to Journal Issue, it would remove the need for co-typing it with Published Work. But otherwise, what you suggest would work. But if we do keep the existing Journal Issue model (as opposed to the CVT version under review), I'd be reluctant to undermine the existing Published Work/Publication model by creating a special type that used a different method of publication. (I realize that I'm already proposing this with the CVT model, and I do recognize the inconsistency; I guess my argument is that if the needs of modeling Journal Articles are significantly different from other types of publications the different model is justified, but if it's just a question of copying the current model onto different types, I'm not sure that it is justified.)

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-04T04:37:43.0012Z

You could make a Journal Article type that includes the published work type. then make the contents of the Journal Issue type link to Journal article. That way any new objects that get linked to from a Journal Issue will automatically be created as Journal Article types. So users won't have to manually add the Journal Article type. The problem is that all existing articles that are presently of the published work type would have to be migrated over to being of the journal article type.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T22:07:06.0012Z

At that point, Journal Article would be nothing more that what we sometimes call a "bucket" -- a type that has no properties, and is therefore just a place to collect things that can be said to be of that type. There are a number of these here and there, but we try to avoid them as much as possible. In order for it to be useful, users would have to remember to add it themselves to each topic that is published in a journal; we're already asking users to manually add a lot of types in the publishing domain, just to use the basic functionality, and I have doubts about how much this type would ever be used.

I can't think of a way, through the UI, to filter out only those works that were published in Journal Issues. How often do you think people would be looking for journal issues but not other types of academic or scholarly papers?

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T21:10:00.0012Z

Okay, let me see if I understand. Currently, you can enter the journal article in the contents of a journal issue where it links in as a publication. And in published work type, there is the "published in" property which gets filled in with the journal issue. So there is no specific Journal Article type because there doesn't need to be one separate from publication. Sorry about the confusion.

So now I'm having trouble figuring out what to do if you want to search for only journal articles? I start by searching for published work, but when I try to filter it by the "published in property", it wants me to put in the name of a specific publication, it doesn't accept the type Journal Issue. I suppose that the sandbox version would solve this problem, but at the expense of not being able to record issue level information. It might still be more user friendly to have a journal article type under the current system even if the journal article type has no extra properties above and beyond published work. It would simply allow for distinguishing journal articles from other publications at a glance.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T19:17:23.0012Z

The issue isn't about having both an article type and an issue type -- we already have those (see the help topic Entering Scholarly Works and Citations for an explanation of the current model). The issue is how to best represent the publication information of an article -- whether by omitting the issue type entirlely, and just using a CVT to capture the basic bibliographic information, like you would see in a bibliography (or bibtex or similar format), or whether to have an explicit topic for every journal article.

There is not, alas, a way to display the information in chained links. You can display disambiguating properties from the expected type of a property only. So in the sandbox version, the volume, issue, etc. are properties on the Journal Publication type, and so can be displayed on the article and journal types the connect to it. But the way we otherwise handle publications is by using the "published work" and "publication" types, which have to be set as co-types on the article and issue. Because the expected type is not explicitly "journal issue", properties on "journal issue" are not displayed on the article or journal.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

Publishing: Book edition properties

2008-09-03T15:29:52.0017Z

I wonder whether there should be an optional editor property for book editions. I just added the book, The Right and the Good, by D.W. Ross. It was originally published in 1930 with no editor. It was re-published in 2002. The 2002 edition was edited by Philip Stratton-Lake. Given the current schema I had to put Philip Stratton-Lake as editor of the book, but this is misleading because it makes it appear that Stratton-Lake was the editor of the 1930 original.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T00:31:03.0012Z

I like the way the sandbox version looks, but I'm not sure I understand the concern about the schemata coming apart if you have both and issue type and an article type. You wouldn't store the issue information separately in the article type, you'd just link to the issue, and the issue in turn links to the Journal.

i.e.,

Object of Article type has a property "Published in" linking it to an object of Journal Issue type

Object of Journal Issue type has a property "Journal" linking it to a journal.

What I'm not sure about, because I'm new to freebase, is whether there is a good way to display the information if links are chained in this way. If you set up the types in the way I've suggested, can you look at a journal article and see both the issue and the journal that that issue links to?

Maybe there's something I'm not getting about your concern about schema getting out of sync. Please let me know as I'm anxious to learn more about how things work around here.

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-03T00:07:30.0012Z

The proposed schema is on sanbox again, here this time:

https://sandbox.freebase.com/type/view/book/journal_publication

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-02T21:57:56.0012Z

I see your point about the theme and target-article issues, and why it would be useful to be able to view the contents at the issue level in those cases. Although if you know the issue/volume/date information, you could use the filter view of the CVT to recreate a table of contents (there would be nothing anywhere that said, however, that "This is the X-themed issue of Y journal". I am more than a bit concerned about using both schemata simultaneously -- I worry both that the two schemata would fall out of synch very quickly, making it harder for users to use the bibliographic data, and also that someone might figure out a way to keep them in synch (via some automated process), which would eat up a lot of extra space.

I'd be curious to hear more of your thoughts on this.

I'll repost the schema to sandbox either later today or tomorrow (the data on sandbox is due to be refreshed in an hour or so).

Publishing: Possible revision for Journal Articles

2008-09-02T20:04:54.0012Z

I think it might be going too far to eliminate the issue type, although I agree that for most purposes the article is what matters. Some journal issues deal with a set theme or with responses to a target article. For example, The American Journal of Bioethics always sets one or more target articles that other contributors respond to. So it might be useful to keep journal issue as its own type to enable tacking this kind of issue-level information. I don't know the system well enough yet to know whether this information can be stored in a CVT or if it needs a standard type. It might make more sense to eliminate the issue type for newspapers, since generally there is no theme to the content of a single newspaper issue.

Publishing: Feild of study

2008-09-02T19:53:19.0000Z

Thank you, you're right that does seem to cover it. I'm still getting used to the way that co-typeing works (i.e., that something can be both a feild of study type and a book subject type).

Publishing: Feild of study

2008-09-02T17:40:31.0012Z

All books have a subject property, which seems like it should be sufficient. (The property is actually on the type "written work", but all books should have that type as a co-type.)

Publishing: Fair use of academic journal indexes

2008-09-02T15:17:36.0017Z

It would be great to have some serious bibliographic data on academic journal articles. Would it be within copyright law to download biblographic data from a proprietary index and then use a custom script to extract and repackege the data into a freebase friendly form and then to bulk upload the lot?

It seems to me that as long as the information in the index which is uploaded is information that is available freely to be public, this should not be a violation of copyright. Obviously a distinction would have to be made between those indexes which simply provide publically available bibliographic data and those which actually generate content that could be considered proprietary (e.g., an index which provides an abstracting service).

Would any copyright experts care to weigh in on this?

Publishing: Journal article type

2008-09-02T15:04:24.0017Z

There doesn't appear to be a type for journal article. There is journal issue, but this doesn't quite cover it. It would be very useful for academic research to have a journal article type which would be for a specific journal article.

Publishing: Feild of study

2008-09-02T00:16:42.0019Z

Academic books should have a property linking them to a feild of study, e.g., philosophy, psychology, etc.

Publishing: Newspaper: Accomodate Weeklies

2008-08-20T22:00:22.0012Z

Take a look here: https://www.freebase.com/view/user/jeff/newspaper and see what you think. I've filled out the San Francisco Chronicle with data in both old and new formats for comparison.

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?

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

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

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

2008-07-22T18:35:33.0007Z

I think that about covers it.

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.

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?

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.