Freebase: Discussion about Business Location

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.

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.

Business Location: 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).

Business Location: 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.

Business Location: 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.

Business Location: 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.