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

[Danny Hillis]

I like these changes. -Danny
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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