[Data-modeling] Even more publishing fun! "Contributing authors"

[Jeff Prucher]

The last (for now!) proposed change to the publishing schema is the addition
of a property to "author" called "works contributed to" that connects to the
type "book edition" (via the property "contributing authors"). This is a
denormalization with the way we can store contents of books (using the
co-types "publication" and "published work" on the book edition and
collected work, respectively). But it does at least two things that are
beneficial. One is to allow users to naively link contributing authors to
works they've contributed to. Examples include stories/poems/essays/etc. in
an anthology; notes, introductions, afterwords, etc. in works written or
compiled by other hands; and chapters in a textbook or reference work. This
is handy if you know that the author wrote something in the book, but you
don't know what it was. The other useful thing it does is allow for a way to
capture this information in cases where the contribution cannot reasonably
be entered using "publication"/"published work". An example of the latter
would be contributing authors or editors to a large reference work who
aren't credited either as one of the main authors/editors or for their
specific contributions.

I tied it to "book edition" rather than "book" because a frequent instance
of this will probably be introductions, afterwords, and the like, which
commonly vary from edition to edition.

Samples (I've entered data in both the "published work" method and
"contributing author" method, where appropriate):
Stephen King, who has contributed a story to an anonymously-edited
anthology, an introduction to a couple editions of Frakenstein, and a brief
entry in a strange fake dictionary (which really cannot reasonably be
entered in the old model):
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/stephen_king

Yet another edition of Frankenstein, with a different intro:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000007d8b9b8

Jeff Prucher
Type Librarian & Ontologist
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.