[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.

Sports Awards

A continuation of the normalization of some domain-specific awards.  
Like the last schema change, we are making this change because many  
domains had nearly identical schemata to model awards specific to that  
domain. Since 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. However, after  
the domain administrators of the sports domain expressed some concerns  
over the semantics of a sports season being an award winning work,  
together we agreed to first normalize all sports award with the  
existing Sports League Award type and examine the migration to the  
awards domain more closely. In the future, we may normalize th Sports  
League Award type to the awards domain.

     * /cricket
     * /soccer

Publishing

In order to allow for more flexibility in the modeling of authors and  
illustrators, and also to reduce the number of redundant properties on  
the different types in the publishing domain, we are adding two sets  
of types to the publishing domain (one set each for writers and  
illustrators). The types "written work" and "illustrated work" are  
supporting types. "Written work" contains properties common to all or  
most varieties of writing (author, copyright date, date of  
publication, language, etc.); "Illustrated work" simply has a property  
for illustrator. The type "writer" will replace the types "author,"  
"editor," "poet," "reviewer," and "interviewer"; the type  
"illustrator" will replace the types "book illustrator," "book cover  
artist" and "magazine cover artist". The new types being introduced are:

     * /book/writer
     * /book/written_work
     * /book/authorship
     * /book/authorship_role
     * /book/illustrator
     * /book/illustrated_work
     * /book/illustration_role
     * /book/illustration_instance

Music

Work on multi-part musical releases is still in progress. 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
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