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

[Bryan Cheung]

There were a couple of comments (both positive) about the book re- 
refactoring thread early on, but none recently.  I'd like to go ahead  
with these changes in the next day or so.  Last call for comments...

Bryan

On Apr 2, 2008, at 2:47 PM, Jeff Prucher wrote:

> 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.
>
>
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