[Data-modeling] Upcoming Schema Changes

[Bryan Cheung]

Hello all,

Unless there is serious objection, we will be making the following  
changes to existing types next week. Please let us know if you have  
any objections to or questions about these changes. The specific  
changes, and rationale for them, are provided below. We hope to keep  
such changes to a minimum, but as we have moved through alpha, a  
variety of issues with some schemas have been discovered, and we are  
hoping to resolve as many of them as possible before we reach beta.  
All such changes will be announced on these lists, and we will take  
any concerns or objections from the community into consideration.

Proposed Changes:

Business

The type company currently has properties which have an expected type  
of money value. However, these are monetary values associated with a  
given point in time. As such, we have modeled a type dated money value  
to represent a money value at a specific date. The expected values of  
the monetary properties of type company should be updated to use the  
type dated money value.

     * /business/company/net_income
     * /business/company/operating_income
     * /business/company/revenue

Awards

The following domains will have their awards normalized to the awards  
domain. We are making this change because many domains had nearly  
identical schemata to model awards specific to that domain. Because  
most domains could potentially have awards associated with them, we  
decided to use a general type schema, rather than requiring separate  
but similar types in many domains. The awards types in the following  
domains will have their data migrated to the /award domain, and the  
types and properties that rely on them will be deleted.

     * /architecture
     * /film
     * /book
     * /science
     * /automotive

Location

The following types will get /location/statistical_region as an  
included type, and if the type has a population property, the data  
will be normalized to the statistical region type. The population data  
and properties on the types listed below will then be deleted. We are  
making this change in order to make it easier to access and compare  
statistical information (such as population) about different  
locations, without having to write multiple queries.

     * /location/country
     * /location/administrative_division
     * /location/citytown
     * /location/census_designated_place

Music

Multi-Part Musical Release and Musical Release Component will be added  
to the Music domain.

     * Individual discs (like “The Beatles (disc 1)”) will be made  
Release Components
     * New multi-part releases will be created corresponding to these  
sets of individual discs
     * Albums currently titled “(disc n)” will be merged together

If you have any opinion on any of the changes, please feel free to  
respond to the mailing list or to me directly.

Thanks for contributing,
Bryan Cheung
bryan.cheung at metaweb.com