[Data-modeling] Rethinking of book/author relationship model

[Jeff Prucher]

Last week I posted a bunch of proposed changes to the publishing domain in
one giant email. The sandbox data has since been refreshed, so I'm reposting
the proposed changes piecemeal, in hopes that they will be clearer.

The main change is that I think the CVT between author and editor needs to
be removed (oops!). It turns out that for the amount of data we will
possibly be getting for books, that the extra cost in primitives that the
CVT adds will probably outweigh whatever gain we get from using the CVT. The
new model I'm proposing keeps the "author" and "written work" types, but
links them directly via two simple properties, rather than one property with
a CVT: On "written work", the properties are "author" and "editor"; the
reverse properties on "author" are "works written" and "works edited". This
maintains the distinction between the two roles, but without the CVT. The
other authorial types we were linking from the CVT (poet, reviewer,
playwright, etc.) refer more to the final product than the type of person
doing the writing, so I don't think they're strictly necessary. (It was a
fairly arbitrary set, anyway -- the difference between a poet and a
playwright is probably not significantly greater than that between a
novelist and journalist, say.) So in the newest model, the mode of
authorship is entirely omitted (except for editor) from the author/written
work relationship. The mode of authorship in a given instance can be
determined by the cotypes on the written work, if so desired.

Here are some examples using the new model:
Jonathan Lethem, a novelist who has also edited a collection of other
people's writings:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/jonathan_lethem

"John Brunner Presents Kipling's Science Fiction", a book with both an
author and editor
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000007d7450a

Allen Ginsberg, a poet who has published poems, books of poems, and books of
prose:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/allen_ginsberg

Jeff Prucher
Type Librarian & Ontologist
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.