Freebase: Discussion about skud

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-18T22:08:16.0013Z

I made the one line fix, but I'm having problems testing it because it continually times out. The one time I did get it to complete it was working on Genus that existed so it didn't test the code path I wanted. If anyone else tries it and finds problems, let me know.

I snapshotted version 2 before my changes, so you can fall back to that if there are problems. http://2.commonsense.doconnor.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/

Are people happy with the methodology of assigning species to a genus which is the first word of the species scientific name? If so, it'd be easy enough to code this up in Python so that it doesn't run into the timeout problems.

Software Developer: Software developper?!

2010-03-18T21:36:03.0009Z

The way this type is currently used, it's a little bit loose. It can be used for both corporations who develop software (which would be the Simile equivalent) and for individual people. I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing since you can work out from the other types which you are dealing with.

Is there a particular circumstance where this is causing you problems or is it just a matter of it intuitively seeming like a poor fit?

(Cross posting to the Software Developer type and its domain, Computers, to see if anyone watching there has a strong opinion one way or the other)

SIMILE: Software developper?!

2010-03-18T21:36:03.0009Z

Is there a particular circumstance where this is causing you problems or is it just a matter of it intuitively seeming like a poor fit?

(Cross posting to the Software Developer type and its domain, Computers, to see if anyone watching there has a strong opinion one way or the other)

NRIS Listing: Significant person property

2010-03-18T19:21:02.0013Z

Thanks, Tom. DA-1096

NRIS Listing: Significant person property

2010-03-18T19:21:02.0013Z

Thanks, Tom. DA-1096

U.S. National Register of Historic Places: 5,000 more entries, additional updates in progress

2010-03-18T18:21:01.0018Z

I just added 5K additional entries. Right now they just have the NRIS item number, but I'll be running the update from the National Park Service database to fill in the the rest of the information shortly. This brings our total to 39,326 sites. Wikipedia has 18,529 articles on National Register sites, all of which should be linked to their appropriate Freebase topic.

The new additions are the result of some analysis that I did with the last quarterly Wikipedia extract (WEX) dump. They mostly represent sites of Local significance which have either been added to Wikipedia since our last run or which we weren't able to find based on name alone. (Remember that we loaded all International, National, and State significance sites, but only those Local sites which already had Wikipedia articles).

The same analysis identified another 2,000 sites which are duplicated with one topic from the National Park Service database and another from Wikipedia, again, either because they've been added to Wikipedia recently or because we couldn't find them last time around.

The last list produced by this analysis is one of 485 sites which are confused in some way and require additional review. These can be things like Hinde & Dauch Paper Company where three different historic buildings/sites are represented by a single Wikipedia article or a variety of other problems. I'll see if I can winnow out some of the common problems automatically, but then I may ask for help in reviewing the remainder.

I've enhanced the National Park Server database (NRIS) loader so that it can handle two different forms of spatial coordinates. Unfortunately, the data in the KMZ files they distribute is the best quality because a lot of it has been geocoded from the street addresses, but the coverage isn't 100%, so I've also added the ability to read coordinates from their spatial.mdb file which should result in better coverage for geo coordinates.

U.S. National Register of Historic Places: 5,000 more entries, additional updates in progress

2010-03-18T18:21:01.0018Z

NRIS Listing: Significant person property

2010-03-18T17:41:45.0013Z

I don't see any objections, so feel free to do this if you're still interested, Jeff.

NRIS Listing: Significant person property

2010-03-18T17:41:45.0013Z

I don't see any objections, so feel free to do this if you're still interested, Jeff.

Reconciliation error

2010-03-18T17:27:55.0000Z

This "book" was created by a reconciliation error; I've relinked the various book editions to the correct topics, so this should be deleted.

Software Developer: Software developper?!

2010-03-18T14:25:27.0018Z

I wouldn't actually say SIMILE is a software developer...

SIMILE: Software developper?!

2010-03-18T14:25:27.0018Z

I wouldn't actually say SIMILE is a software developer...

Research Project: Research-Project infobox template

2010-03-18T14:22:02.0018Z

What do you think, could we actually use the same attributes Sören Auer used for the Research-Project infobox template in wikipedia?!

Name refers to the short name or acronym of your project.
Title usually is a short (max. one sentence) description of the project
Keywords link the project with relevant standards or techologies
Funding Agency names the agency funding the project, e.g. EU, NSF, DARPA; use Wikipedia links to link to the respective Wikipedia article
Image is the name of a project logo, which should be uploaded to Wikipedia Commons
Project Type refers to an instrument of the funding agency which the project belogs to, for EU FP7 projects these are STReP, IP, No E, CSA
Research Objective names general research objectives of the funding agency which the project targets
Project Reference is a project identifier (or contract number) asigned to the project by the funding agency
Coordinator names the organization coordinating the research project
Participants lists the projects participants; try to link them to their corresponding Wikipedia pages
Budget refers the overall project budget
Funding is the funding provided by the funding agency
Start contains the start date of the project, End the prospective end date
Website names the URL of the project Website

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-18T07:20:26.0024Z

Oh oh.

I've got a few (non freebase) things to knock off before I can get to this meaningfully - if you wish, I've added you with access to the application; please feel free to make any changes you deem necessary.

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-18T06:58:07.0047Z

The commonsense tool needs to be changed to add the type /common/topic on newly created topics. Without this they don't show up in autocomplete and other basic operations like merge don't work.

I just submitted fixes for a batch of almost 6K of these which should clear up the current stuff, but the tool should be fixed if it's going to be used on an ongoing basis.

Film Cinematographer

2010-03-18T02:01:07.0018Z

Properties belong on /en/elliot_davis.

split then delete

2010-03-18T01:57:24.0019Z

disambiguation page - split then delete whne properties/keys are moved.

split

2010-03-18T01:50:56.0018Z

not the film editor.

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-18T00:37:02.0013Z

about 2% of the 86k names I asserted didnt match ^[A-Z][a-z]{2,} [a-z]{3,}$' so ill add that check.

the single letter culprits are: 90 U. 23 P. 19 C. 6 M. 6 D. 6 B. 5 N. 5 A. 3 S. 2 T. 2 L. 2 G. 1 H. 1 E.

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-18T00:23:56.0013Z

good catch, sorry about that.

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-17T22:49:39.0013Z

Also; there's a fair few names like "C. (something)" which should be cleaned up - doing by hand now; but if you wanted to build this into the next iteration of the tool...

[{ "FBID430:scientific_name": [{ "lang": "/lang/en", "type": "/type/text", "value~=": "^C\.*" }], "id": null, "name": null, "scientific_name": null, "type": "/biology/organism_classification" }]

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-17T22:29:18.0013Z

Oops! We got a few extra bits like wiki markup for italic text or links.

I'm cleaning up by hand.

// MQL to see leading quotes [{ "FBID430:scientific_name": [{ "lang": "/lang/en", "type": "/type/text", "value~=": "^\'*" }], "id": null, "name": null, "scientific_name": null, "type": "/biology/organism_classification" }]

cheunger: VIOLATORS Classic NYC PUNK ROCK"N"ROLL

2010-03-17T18:37:15.0013Z

misterearl,

First off, thank you for adding Violators information to freebase. That being said, freebase is a social database that anyone can view or edit. If I edited Violators information, it was because the structure of your data did not fit the schema that you were using and I was correcting it - for example, if a musical artist is both the singer and the lead guitarist, that should be represented by one entry "singer and lead guitarist" but as separate items. See Rich Wretch as an example. Also, you must be careful when entering data - Rich Wretch is not an Arrangement - most likely he was implicitly typed as such because you entered the data incorrectly (Rich Wretch is not an arrangement of My Country).

Additionally, any data you enter into freebase is CC-BY.

Please be more careful when entering your data - if you are unsure on how to use the schema, please look at the documentation for the type or ask questions!

I and other users of freebase will continue to update information that we see as incorrect use of schema.

cheunger: VIOLATORS Classic NYC PUNK ROCK"N"ROLL

2010-03-17T06:56:23.0018Z

please do not edit or change my band INFO which i own all rights and am song writer/composer/performer in good standing with BMI , RIAA and please refrain from deleting or adding wrong info..i am the VIOLATORS founder and songwriter/composer/producer/engineer and founder...thanks and peace!!

Military Service: Military Unit

2010-03-16T21:27:01.0012Z

Good suggestion. Looks like I've been making the same error! I'll go ahead and add the property.

Military Service: Military Unit

2010-03-16T18:09:02.0018Z

I think Military Service should have a property for Military Unit.

It would allow the unit someone served in to be noted, and hopefully stem some of the confusion where people (myself included) mistakenly enter the Military Unit in place of the Armed Force.

Airline Airport Presence: Destination Cities

2010-03-16T07:24:11.0013Z

There's currently only 86 destination cities. Given that we know the airline and departure airport, determining the destination airport for a city wouldn't be too hard with a bit of cross-referencing from other sources. I'll volunteer to garden that data manually, if the change in schema happens.

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-16T02:23:29.0006Z

Thanks Jeff. I look forward to better "tools" to upload and work with data.

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-15T23:00:44.0013Z

I think that "Y Store, Fifth Ave., New York" is pretty acceptable, assuming that there are other NY locations. (Doing it for businesses with a single location would be unnecessary, I should think.) It's pretty common, I think, to refer to individual stores (restaurants, branch offices, etc.) this way (the "New York office", the "Union Square store", etc.). The alternative would be to have hundreds of topics named "Starbucks" with no clear way of disambiguating them, since the only real disambiguating property is the address, and since address is a CVT, it doesn't show up like other disambiguating properties (e.g., in the autocomplete flyout) . Having the full address in the name like happened with the ChefMoz import is probably overkill, though.
The properties that are available when you're creating a new topic from that particular view are those which are displayed in the table. These automatically-generated views display some combination of the first few properties of the type (ordered as they are when you look at the schema or at a topic in edit mode) and the properties marked as disambiguators (I don't know the exact logic). Note also that properties that expect CVTs are not included when determining which properties to offer for input on this page. So, of the properties on Business Location, I think the ones being presented are pretty sensible. I'm not a UI designer by a long shot, but as long as you can only create one new topic at a time, it doesn't seem any harder to me to enter the properties vertically than horizontally -- you still have to tab (or click) between them, and at least with vertical input, you don't get the side-scrolling that occurs for some properties when you edit them from the topic page.

But requests for UI improvements can be made in JIRA; like I said, I'm not a designer, so I only have limited insight into these issues. I did notice, however, that the property hints aren't displayed (even as tooltips) when creating topics from the table view page, which is clearly an oversight, so I opened a ticket for that: CLI-9745.

Airline Airport Presence: Destination Cities

2010-03-15T21:38:43.0013Z

I agree that "airport" would be a better expected type. Since most of the property values are currently cities, rather than airports, we'd probably have to throw out most of the data (in some cases we might be able to infer which airport it should be, but lots of cities are served by multiple airports).

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-15T21:15:29.0013Z

I might get a bit off topic here concerning the Web UI itself, but bear with me...

2 problems were identified by me, Jeff.

Should the tool tip description remain as giving an example of "Y Store, Fifth Ave., New York" that is perfectly acceptable , when we clearly don't want redundancy, but merely normalization ? ....and if so # 2 is a suggestion to improve the data collection UI ...
Why couldn't the Web UI be improved ? When I go here to this view to add business locations http://www.freebase.com/view/business/business_location and click add more topics, the pop-down defaults to showing only the name, opening date, closing date, and parent company. I think better properties to collect here would be the location details themselves, yes ?, such as name, address, city, state, and parent company and preferrably show them going left to right as a new row, just like a "gasp" spreadsheet, rather than vertically now on the right? The UI is really the culprit for me, when I'm going to add less than 10 items, because it doesn't mimic a spreadsheet view entirely, in my opinion. For more than 10 items, I use an external spreadsheet editor and tools such as Loader.

I stay in EDIT mode, so I benefit, but we cursed sometimes by that view and it's tempting "edit" link on the left of individual properties on any particular topic and usually smack face first into data collection problems from a users perspective such as this. I rarely click the Detailed View link just to the right of it. Don't get me wrong, I like the inline edit, but sometimes, its ... a pain, and slow.

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-15T20:10:41.0015Z

This is a complex thread to jump in late to, but I think we're down to just the property name being an issue? (Since the help text wasn't causing the topic names which included street addresses, which I think was the main cause of Thad's complaint about them. But I could be wrong, and if there are additional ways the help text could be improved, though, I'd be happy to hear them.)

The problem with the property name, as Tom says, is that the Business Location type can be used for all kinds of things, so we need a term that can encompass branches, headquarters, outlets, store/restaurant locations, offices, and the like. Unfortunately, the closest term, "location," has another meaning which is confusing. (Certainly, in the retail world, individual stores of a chain are commonly called "locations.") We could go in the direction of a list, and call it something like "Branches, stores, etc." I try to avoid that sort of phrasing in general, but sometimes it's the best choice. Other suggestions would be welcome, too.

Geologic time period: Make dates unique

2010-03-15T19:44:58.0006Z

I spent a bunch of time poking around Wikipedia, trying to see if there was an easy way to extract the dates from the infoboxes, but the date range information is tucked away somewhere not easily extractable, alas.

Museums, Libraries, and Archives: Status of MLAdraft concerning Museums

2010-03-15T19:04:09.0000Z

What is the current status of the MLAdraft base as it concerns Museums ? In other words, could someone provide a bulleted list of roadmap enhancements for the schema that will come about specifically concerning Museums ?

Airline Airport Presence: Destination Cities

2010-03-15T17:37:34.0000Z

I agree. Airports have a "cities served" property which could be used to locate the actual city if that's needed.

Airline Airport Presence: Destination Cities

2010-03-15T13:58:34.0018Z

I think the destination cities property would be better as destination airport (expecting a type of airport), rather than destination cities. Aircraft fly airport to airport, and it makes a big difference what airport is flown to. e.g. Luton compared to London Heathrow.

Geologic time period: Make dates unique

2010-03-14T20:29:46.0015Z

Thanks for fixing this up. I typed a bunch more topics with the newly revamped type, but many of them still need their dates filled in.

Geologic time period: Recording Geologic Events?

2010-03-14T20:28:32.0020Z

How does one deal with geologic events such as Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, or Eocene-Oligocene extinction event?

The Event type can't handle dates in that range. Should they just be very short Geologic Time Periods or does something need to be added/extended?

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-14T17:09:23.0013Z

You can name your new Business Location "Loving Care," "Loving Care branch," or "Loving Care, Jersey Shore." It's just a matter of taste, not something critical. Personally, I'd pick something that made sense in the local context as opposed to something that helps with global disambiguation.

The Burger Kings were imported from ChefMoz and someone made the decision to tack the addresses onto the name. It's not something that was done manually and it'd be easy enough to script a fix to remove them if it was important enough to someone. On ChefMoz itself, they're listed with just the name "Burger King" which is what would make sense to me for Freebase. Note that they all have address information encoded in properties too, so the information in the name is redundant.

The problem with choosing a new name for the property is finding one which will work in all the contexts where this can be used. It's wider in scope than just "branch" or something equally simple. I'm afraid I don't have any good suggestions for alternatives.

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-14T16:41:27.0000Z

I agree the name should change. Not sure to what, but lots of folks get confused by it

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-13T17:24:08.0000Z

Yes, Tom, that was the tool tip I looked at. I don't like the fact that I have to click on the ?. But besides that, I still don't understand the helpfulness of this property if it doesn't explain itself well enough. That last sentence is the key to good data, in my opinion. We have seen what happens when a property is NOT described at all, even you and I have been bit by that scenario. Certainly, I am not going to fill it with all the McDonalds, Burger King, or Wal-Mart locations. (Someone appears to already be doing that - lol.)

If I understand this correctly, your saying that for Loving Care Agency and it's 28 business locations( but I'm NOT supposed to think of it as a LOCATION, even though it uses the term, I'm supposed to think of this as a branch office - lol), that I would type in a unique name, such as "Loving Care Office, Jersey Shore" and it shows as that business location type is not found, of course, so I then click CREATE NEW BUSINESS LOCATION, which creates a new unique GUID and TOPIC for a business_location , and then for that new business_location store, office, branch, etc that was created, at it's /business/business_location/address I would add the address information filling in the appropriate city there. I'm fine with that.

However, The bad tool tip description, to me, results in extra information that is sometimes not needed. In my opinion, storing address information freeform in the name misses the whole point of Freebase. And results in illogical views such as this http://www.freebase.com/view/en/burger_king/-/business/company/locations where you have the address field already showing and certainly you can create your own views whenever you want.

I think reducing the ambiguous description will also help reduce these extremely long business location names that really aren't necessary. THIS BAD DESCRIPTION IS CREATING VERY LAZY FOLKS that type a bunch of properties, address, city, state, etc. all in one line, the "business location name", instead of taking the time to fill in the appropriate properties, and collect good data. Or perhaps they didn't properly scrub and delimit their data loads, who knows. But in my opinion, 1 good bit is worth more than 1000 bad extra bits.

What are your ideas or agreements ?

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-13T04:53:33.0005Z

Exactly, Simon, and I am concerned precisely about them !

This was initially a list of musicologists; now, some of them are being transformed into "catalogue creators," whereas the vast majority is being left out. Where they had the "Musicologist" type before, now they have the "Music catalogue creator" type which is wrong in their case (that is why we have to remove them from the list).

The question remains: is it possible to have a general "Musicologist" type which will include all musicologists, and have a property for the catalogue creators ?

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-13T00:06:25.0013Z

I don't know if it's been edited since you posted this, but the help for the property currently says "Offices, stores, outlets, plants, campuses, etc. run by this company. These might not always have obvious names, but names like "X Company Headquarters" or "Y Store, Fifth Ave., New York" are perfectly acceptable. (Enter Business Location)". This is accessible by clicking the ? in the data entry popup. Is that what you were looking at or some other tool tip?

Think of it as a branch office, not a location like a city or street.

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T23:48:46.0013Z

The vast majority of musicologist didn't/won't create catalogs.

Company: Good Grief - Business Locations property

2010-03-12T22:15:04.0011Z

I really thought I was much smarter than I appeared to be... until today.

My assumption was that Business Locations could include City Names. Apparently, I was wrong. See Loving Care Agency

I made this mistake, because the tip text mentioned "NY", but apparently, the implied meaning is that this field should be filled with a specific business location NAME. Such as "Perth Amboy, Adult Care Center, NJ" and not just type and link directly to a /city topic such as Perth Amboy

I am wondering how many others get confused by this property ? And if the help text should be changed ? I don't like the way it links back and messes with the wrong type of view when looking at City's. Maybe just the linking needs to be changed somehow to make this look better ? Perhaps the Contains property instead ? For example:

[Perth Amboy] (http://www.freebase.com/view/en/perth_amboy) could have a nice view showing which companies have a business location there? Was that they intent here ? or should we just drop this property altogether, and instead use "Contains" property to favor better use of Lat/Long/Geocodes ?

Anyone have thoughts on a better way to handle "Business Locations" ? Or, perhaps it just needs to be expanded with a CVT and the city ?

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T20:14:43.0013Z

Jeff, I am not making a "musicologist" type in my base because that's exactly what I am trying to avoid, creating a type without properties. I am thinking about a "musicologist" type that would include the catalogue stuff, if possible.

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T17:41:40.0013Z

If you want a musicologist type, feel free to make one of your own in your own base. But types with no properties are not especially useful, and if the purpose is to be able to say "X is a musicologist", the profession property should be sufficient. (The alternative is having separate types for every single possible occupation, which is clearly not possible or desirable.)

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T17:37:34.0013Z

... because now the musicologists who did not create catalogues are orphan.

Would it be possible to have the type "Musicologist" to include ALL musicologists and some property for the catalogue stuff (for the ones who created catalogues) ?

I know about the musicologist list (as a profession), I did much of it myself, what I am missing is the "musicologist type.

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T14:24:28.0000Z

Maybe, but that was inappropriate given that it was the expected type of the music catalog's "creator" property. We're now fixing that so we can promote the music catalog type. This type isn't a Commons type, so it shouldn't be considered stable.

Stepping back a bit, a much better way to get a list of musicologists and that's to create a view of all people with a profession of "musicologist"'; in fact, this already exists, so I really don't see why this is an issue.

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T06:09:49.0013Z

...and this was a list of musicologists !

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T06:04:44.0013Z

I already removed 2 of them.

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T05:51:16.0013Z

Carmen: semantically, that type is a list of music catalog creators; from a data modeling point of view, it's irrelevant that the current members of the set are musicologists. As Simon says, anyone who wants to create a list of musicologists can, but that has no bearing on what the expected type for the creator of a music catalog should be, which is what we're discussing here.

Composer: music catalog

2010-03-12T05:13:31.0013Z

I will double check and remove any who have not created a music catalog.

Anyone else who wants a list of musicologists can build that and, if they want, link any musicologists who have made a catalog to this list.

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-11T23:45:08.0013Z

I think you are dead right in that we need to provide more value. At the moment freebase offers a pre-parsed version of wikipedia content (warts and all), mapped to some existing data sources (ie: ITIS), and a query language with a low barrier to learn (mql, not unlike sparql, basically json); as well as RDF output linked back to dbpedia/other places (linked data yay).

The next level of offerings that we need to get to are:

A bunch of really slick tools which can assimilate other unique large data sources for low effort (ie: http://data.australia.gov.au/570)
Interlink relevant data extremely densely, focusing on identifiers (so we can help power http://sameas.org/) - this is already done by some
Simple but effective visualisation tools which are more focused on the general public / data meshups which are relevant and interesting to the general public - ie; we know about human populated urban areas (things typed with /city/town); can we provide the 'top 5 most common' animals in a given area (and push people off to learn more on other sites)? Can we, for instance, build decent indexes of animals zoos of the world; so that we can answer the question of "where can I see this animal"?

After we have that kind of thing in place, if there's no real interest, I'll personally kidnap a few people in the field; and go back to the "lock them into the room" plan :D

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-11T22:49:20.0013Z

I added 48k scientific_names using doconnor's suggestion.

Biology: Acre applications to populate data?

2010-03-11T19:41:08.0013Z

I think Freebase's potential, which has not necessarily been demonstrated yet, is to provide a bridge between among disciplines as well as between the semi-structured world of Wikipedia and more structured data representations.

This enabling technology is worth very little without a community to exploit it however, so if biologists (or any other community) don't find it valuable enough to contribute to, it certainly won't be valuable. Like any other community effort it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Amateurs can get it bootstrapped to the point where it's possible to see the potential, but it takes domain expertise to sustain and enhance.

Of course, one of the nice things about stitching a variety of data sources together is that if the community gravitates to any of the constituent databases, the improvements should benefit all the other linked databases.