TV episode performance limitation

First, thanks for doing this. I’ve recently begun attempting to watch all the Doctor Who episodes from the beginning, which is entertaining.

Secondly, please note that no value in Freebase is actually required. You don’t have to give the character.

That said, I don’t really see a problem with having a character for “Man in bar” as long as “Man in bar” from twentieth-season Doctor Who is not the same as “Man in bar” from Beverly Hills Cop, who is not the same as “Man in bar” from Babylon 5: The Gathering. Even those anonymous characters have gender and organizational affiliations, and for science fiction, species. I had a lot of fun fully populating the cast for the B5 pilot, though I haven’t gotten back to doing it for all the episodes.

I started filling in cast lists from the 2008 end and working backwards, so perhaps we'll meet somewhere in about 1975 :) So far I've left character as an empty field in places where the character is unnamed - that at least means the information can satisfy actor queries. But you're right, adding scenery characters does allow extra facts to be added and other connections to be made that are not otherwise possible.

I've already run (several times) into an issue with Freebase with "common" topic names - you can't link to the right one - which makes me want to avoid them if I can, but if the right bit of juicy data comes up, I'll be sure to do so :)

Hi Chris N,

You mentioned having problems with autocomplete, where the item you wanted wasn't on the list. Do you still remember what exactly you entered? I'd be interested to know: 1) the property you used autocomplete on, 2) the string you entered, 3) expected topic. Among other things I test the relevance engine that produces these results, so issues are of interest to me.

Also, autocomplete is not an "exact name matcher". You can enter additional information unique to your topic to help boost it to the top. For TV episodes, for example, entering the TV show's name in addition to the episode name helps, especially if the episode name is "The Rescue" or something that'd find many matches.

Hi there,

Don't spend too much time worrying about this, I've gotten a little more experience now with how things work here - and a bit more confidence on how things are 'expected' to work. The point about the non-exact matcher is well-taken, now I've seen the autocomplete more often suggest topics which are "useful" rather than exact, I have a few ideas how to use it to help me search as well. The main thing I've been doing lately is, if I definitely need a precise node that's unlikely to be high up the list, I open up another window and search for its guid.

 As it happens, I was experimenting with 'previous/next episode' as a reciprocal relationship. (This has been added to TV episode now, but to experiment with it I added a "TV episode additional data" type in my default domain). So:

1) I was trying to fill a 'previous' property on a 'TV episode additional data' type.

2) I was looking for the Doctor Who episode 'Midnight' and used just 'Midnight' as the search string.

3) The right node doesn't show in the suggestions - but I understand why, now. Until this relationship was filled, the target node didn't have the 'additional' type, just the existing TV episode. So the type information wasn't helpful in the search.

 My expectation that an "exact name" would take priority threw me a curve ball - once I got past that, I have no expectation now that somehow the machine will automagically work it out for me *every* time... 99.9% of the time is good enough for me - the corner cases are worth the extra work.