Government

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T19:02:58.0012Z

Very nice! But please bear in mind that a "military combatant" is an armed force, not a person. Otherwise we end up with an assertion that Zachary Taylor was in command of himself at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee -- always a quality you look for in a commander, of course, but not quite what the schema was meant to represent. :)

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-25T18:26:09.0012Z

OK, that's fine. I just wanted to make sure we wanted this by design, and it wasn't an oversight. Thanks

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:44:02.0000Z

Finally, this should work:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008ffcc10

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:37:14.0000Z

Sorry, that link got screwed up. Hopefully this one works:

Filter Table View

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:30:49.0012Z

As a good starting place to explore this information, you should take a look at the Filter Table View. Here's a view that shows all U.S. Presidents who served in the Army as Brigadiers General

To do more detailed searches to do things like aggregate the number of presidents who have served in each branch of the armed services you may want to look into MQL, the Metaweb Query Language.

Hope this gives you a good start.

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T02:13:18.0018Z

With all the discussion about the military experience of presidential candidates, it would be valid and useful to be able to conduct a search on the rank, conflict, and length of service for presidents.

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-25T01:11:28.0012Z

The instance of time served is a particular tenure. Any dated property like this (including band membership, places lived) should have mutiple tenure instances for discontinuous tenures. Take a look at Grover Cleveland for an example.

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-24T00:30:29.0017Z

Should the time served under "Government Office or Title" allow for non-consecutive terms? See Peter Clavelle as Mayor of Burlington Vermont.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-06T04:23:11.0012Z

Yeah, this is actually what I wanted, but didn't do a good job vocalizing. Oh well. The end result is a plus.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-06T03:59:08.0012Z

Thanks Jeff. I understand that joguinn was asking for something slightly different but I think that this might still reduce some of the manual labour associated with linking politicians to parties.

Right now, it looks like he's typing Republican Party as an Organization and adding Bob Barr to its members and then on Barr's page it shows that he's a member of an organization called the Republican Party but he also has to add the Republican Party to Bob Barr's party property as part of the Politician type.

Now that Political Party has a reverse link, all he needs to do is set Republican Party as Bob Barr's party and Barr will automatically appear on the Republican Party page as a Politician in this Party.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-06T03:38:33.0012Z

Hmm...I guess there's no easy way to differentiate between identical districts with different juristictions right now.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-05T22:03:50.0012Z

It's not the Wikipedia crawler -- it's Wikipedia itself. If there are two articles for something in Wikipedia, those will both be added to Freebase. Some of them appear not to be true duplicates, but simply provincial and federal ridings with the same name (see the two Brampton Wests: here and here; they have the same name, and appear to use the same map, but they were formed on different dates).

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-05T21:52:34.0012Z

We could do that; I had forgotten that it wasn't reciprocated. In fact, I'll go do that right now. But joguinn's question was about automatically using the party property on the election campaign type to auto-populate the party property on the politician type, which isn't possible.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-05T05:38:00.0005Z

There appear to be a lot of duplicate Political Districts - at least for Canada. Too many for me to flag them all for merge by hand. It could be a problem with the Wikipedia crawler.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-05T04:24:11.0012Z

Couldn't you get the automatic linking of political parties to politicians simply by enabling the return link for the Political Party Tenure property that is incoming from Politician?

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T18:35:59.0012Z

Alright, well thanks. I just figured I'd ask because the party pages are pretty sparse despite the fact that many politicians are identified as members of the parties.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T17:54:54.0000Z

To answer the more general question implied here: There isn't any way to auto-fill properties based the contents of other properties.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T17:08:48.0012Z

It’s kind of a fuzzy question. In some states, anyone registered with a party can run as a candidate with that party, even if they aren’t properly a member or even completely misunderstand the party’s position (such as Ken Hamidi, a Libertarian candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall, who registered Libertarian believing that to be a socialist party). In other states and in many countries, the party as a group chooses its candidates, and so they are necessarily affiliated. Cross-nomination also makes things weird; very few candidates of the Liberal or Conservative parties in New York state are members of those parties, for instance.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T14:50:33.0017Z

Is there any way, besides manually adding each politician to a party's "members" properties, to link a politician to a party? For instance, I have added a lot of campaigns. It should stand to reason that if a candidate runs as a Republican, that person has at some point been a Republican.

Government: Streamlining "Political Office Held"

2007-09-21T00:17:48.0007Z

I'd like to thank everyone who's commented on my first attempt at this. Based on various comments, I've come up with a new attempt: http://www.freebase.com/view/domain/user/jeff/government_test_2. Come by, put in some data, and let me know what you think! (More specific details about what I changed are discussed in my private domain.)

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-09-17T08:13:34.0007Z

It should be ready now - I wanted to add a few more politicians, but I can always do that later.

I tried something a bit different - the "Australian MP" type links to an "Australian House of Parliament" type (via a compound type). So you can tell whether an MP is federal or state by which house of parliament they belong to. Not sure yet if this is the best way to do it ...

So the types in question are "Australian Political Party", "Australian Politician", "Australian MP", "Australian House of Parliament" and "Australian Parliament Membership", which are all linked together.

Government: Streamlining "Political Office Held"

2007-09-13T23:59:29.0012Z

I think it might be a good idea to streamline the "us political offices held" type, and make it so that one type can be used for all countries, which should make this domain a bit easier to handle. It will also solve a major problem, which is that there is currently no way in the schema to link from a country to its elected officials. I've posted the modified type over in my private domain. I'd love to get everyone's comments on it and see if we can come to an agreement on this.

The main changes would be to eliminate the "state (if state)", "county (if county)", etc. properties and replace it with a new property that can be used for all levels of government. It would also do away with the need for some country-specific types (politician and political party).

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-08-28T22:44:20.0000Z

Just let me know when you think that Australian politics is ready share,

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-08-22T03:21:46.0007Z

No problem - I notice that lots have things have changed today ...

I've started on a few types for Australian politics in my domain, so I'll keep adding to those following the types for UK and/or US politics as appropriate.

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-08-21T18:26:17.0007Z

Sorry tp be slow responding. I think the UK Politician pattern is worth following since it creates a useful pattern for completion, since the same pool of people tend to hold multiple offices.

It rare for a politician from one country to hold an office in another, so I don't think the general polician template is so useful, and I think people would tend to overuse it.

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-08-14T00:37:48.0000Z

Fair enough. In that case, would it be worth creating some sort of template for a politician type?

Also I see that "UK MP" includes "UK Politician" as a type - is this pattern worth following in general?

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-08-10T21:04:02.0000Z

Yes, that's the idea, because different systems of government have different properties associated with the position.

Government: New Type: President of Germany

2007-08-10T21:02:42.0000Z

done

Government: Types of Politicians for all countries?

2007-07-18T00:03:42.0011Z

Will we need to create a separate politician type for each country? Currently we've got them for the USA, UK, Canada ... will we create them for France, Germany, Russia, ... ? I guess that's useful because you can group all the UK politicians easily, but couldn't this be done as a search on "Politician" and "Nationality: UK"? Otherwise we could end up with hundreds of politician types, but maybe that's not a problem ...

Government: New Type: President of Germany

2007-07-06T23:16:27.0007Z

Welcome to Freebase.

You can create types in your own domain, and an administrator can make them part of the public domain. The help files give guidance on creating types: http://www.freebase.com/view/helpindex?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000012090ef.

A couple of tips: It's always good to try things out on Sandbox (http://sandbox.freebase.com)--it's wiped clean and rewritten with data from the main site every Monday, making it a good place to experiment. Also, when you've got your model in shape, make sure to add some sample data--flaws in a data model often don't show up until you try incorporating some real data.

Once you're happy with the types you've created, post a note in the discussion area of the domain you're interested in so the admins can take a look at your work.

Meantime, feel free to post again if any questions come up about your model!

Best,
Sarah

Government: New Type: President of Germany

2007-07-06T05:25:07.0012Z

Hi all,

I'd like to create a special "Type" for the 9 presidents we had in Germany since 1946. Can I do that or do I need an admin's special premission?

Government: GovTrack.us

2007-06-19T02:13:15.0011Z

Is Freebase integrating RDF data from Govtrack.us ?

I can't figure out how to tell. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to know or care. Is the use case for Freebase to "not worry about the source"? Won't there come times when certain data sources have contentious definitions for something that would have a very similar display name? Or is ironing that out a kind of editorial authority that the Freebase community accepts, in the same way that Wikipedians collectively work out "notability" and "neutrality"?