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).

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: Religion - Catholicism vs Catholic/Roman Catholic

2008-02-22T21:37:02.0007Z

This is a subject of some confusion; see also “Hinduism and Hindu.” It may be worth revisiting this structure.

The linguistic arguments are not the right approach, though, IMO. There are things one can say about Catholicism, as a concept, regardless of its label (or the language of that label), and things one can say about Catholics (again, regardless of the label or language), and they are two distinct concepts.

Followups are probably best discussed in the Religion domain.

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.

Person: Religion - Catholicism vs Catholic/Roman Catholic

2008-02-22T20:19:01.0005Z

The current typing of religion seems awkward to me. It lists JFK's religion as "Catholicism" when, if he were asked what religion he was, he almost certainly would have said "Catholic," or more likely, "Roman Catholic." In addition to the phrasing (perhaps using the "adherent" form would fix that), the loss of specificity doesn't really seem desirable. In real life, people probably do consider themselves affiliated with a specific church (in the sense of an administrative hierarchy, set of policies, etc as opposed to a buliding), not just a generic religion. It looks like things were refactored a while ago to remove this level of specificity, which doesn't seem like an improvement.

Person: Naming

2007-09-27T21:31:03.0007Z

This is a tricky problem. Right now, we're just storing variant/alternative names in the "alias" property, which is better than nothing, but as you suggest, doesn't provide any real structure or information about those names. So adding some structure to this is appealing. But from a data-modeling standpoint, I have some questions about this approach: Should multiple middle names be entered as one instance of a property, or as separate instances? If the latter, how do we ensure they're ordered correctly? How do we differentiate between birth-names and names that were taken later (or should we make this distinction at all)? Asian names could probably be dealt with by finding culturally-neutral terminology for "first" and "last" names, although data input and reconciliation will be harder since the names are often ambiguously ordered when they're transliterated.

From a data-acquisition standpoint, I don't think we have any sources currently that model data this way, and doing an automatic extraction from, say, Wikipedia would be fraught with problems. We have, however, been discussing ways to handle pseudonyms/alternate names used by authors and musicians, which could presumably be generalized, and would at least address the pseudonym issue.

Person: Naming

2007-09-24T21:24:55.0005Z

While it seems to make sense that the main name for a person be the arbitrary string most associated with that person, shouldn't this database, like almost every other application that references people I know of, break the name down, i.e., have separate fields for first, middle, last, and post (like III or jr), and then another for "nickname," and yet another for alternative name(s) like pen name (e.g. Mark Twain/Samuel L. Clemens/Sam).

Person: Relationships

2007-09-20T02:24:40.0007Z

It seems to me that the complication is already there, regardless of whether Freebase deals with the complication. Are multiple parents currently impossible? Are bad inferences currently impossible? Are people currently devoid of curiosity regarding parent/child relationships? To what degree will the company Metaweb control Freebase in attempts to avoid offending people? To what degree will the company Metaweb control Freebase in attempts to avoid conflicting or ambiguous data? In any case, what do mediators offer that properties do not offer?

Person: Relationships

2007-09-17T01:16:59.0000Z

It’s a matter of what information is desired. Right now, we only have the parent/child relationship; it doesn’t say whether it’s exclusively biological or adoptive or either. That could easily result in people with multiple parents, or bad inferences, such as someone with two parents who were not married to each other until well after his birth; that could be an out-of-wedlock birth, or it could be a step-parent relationship. Genealogists, people looking for health information, and people curious about nobility would all want to know the specifics of the relationship. But on the other hand, particularly for living people, many people consider an adoptive relationship to be exactly the same as a biological one, and we need (IMO) to be sensitive to that.

Person: Relationships

2007-09-17T00:22:46.0007Z

What is complicated about handling adoptive relationships?

Person: Relationships

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

Person: Signature?

2007-03-12T00:46:16.0006Z

There are a lot of digitized signatures for historic people which are available through different collections. (See WP Infoboxes for instance.)

Person: Signature?

2007-03-09T22:10:48.0006Z

Not sure why its there. JG added it.

Person: Signature?

2007-03-07T20:30:33.0012Z

Why is there a signature property? Do we expect there to be a lot of people with signatures?