[Data-modeling] Events

[Jeff Prucher]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of 
> Kirrily Robert
> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 12:33 PM
> To: Freebase data modeling mailing list
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] Events
> 
> 
> ----- "Jeff Prucher" <jeff at metaweb.com> wrote:
> > I agree. A use case is military conflicts, for which 
> Wikipedia already 
> > contains extractable super/sub-conflict relationships. (E.g. "the 
> > invasion of normandy" is a part of "world war II"; "the battle of 
> > omaha beach"
> > is
> > part of the invasion of normandy, etc.)
> 
> OK, that sounds sane.
> 
> I was thinking this morning on the train about event 
> locations.  If historic periods are just long-running events, 
> then what is the location of the 20th century? Or of the 
> Impressionist Movement in art?  
>
> One thing I found when populating some data in event and 
> historic period was that it starts to run into problems of 
> dated locations, too.  What was the location of the 
> historical period "Classical Antiquity"?  Is "Italy" a 
> sensible location to list there, given that Italy didn't 
> exist as such until quite recently?  If, instead, we list 
> locations as they were at the time, then it becomes very 
> difficult to eg. search for events occuring in any given Balkan state.

Of course, since political boundaries are shifting constantly, would it even
make sense to try to use only current locations for events? If Kosovo
secedes from Serbia, would we have to go into all the events, no matter how
ancient,  that we claim occurred in Serbia, and figure out which ones should
be in modern Kosovo instead? 

Jeff Prucher