[Data-modeling] Suggested changes to the military conflict schema

[Jeff Prucher]

This is a task from months ago that finally bubbled up to the top of my
queue.  We had a request in the military discussion posts requesting a
better way to model the relationships between actors in a military conflict.
The problem is how to represent groups of combatants fighting on the same
side in a conflict (a conflict, in this schema, can be anything in scale
from a single battle to an entire war). The current model represents this as
a standard type (i.e., one that has a name), which requires that each battle
have two combatants with names like "Tet Offensive anticommunist forces" to
fully represent which forces (countries, divisions, units, etc.) fought on a
given side. (See
http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000004f3cbee for an
example.)  This a) is a pain to use, b) is sort of ugly, c) makes automated
data-importing very difficult, and d) means that you have to make an extra
click to see which forces actually fought in the conflict.

My proposal is to make this into a CVT, and allow multiple values for the
combatants. This has two advantages: first, it avoids the extra step of
having to create an intermediate type; and second, it means that the
combatants are all listed on the topic for the conflict itself. A few other
changes fall out of this, such as how commanders, force strengths, and
casualties are modeled, but these are all secondary to the main change, and
I won't go into gory detail here. If you're interested, though, please take
a look at the schema in my private domain. Please bear in mind that the
types in my domain are sketches, and I only included properties that would
be affected. Other properties in the current schema will be kept. Please
also note that the names of my types are not serious suggestions -- I just
wanted to avoid confusion with the current military types; in most cases
we'd keep the existing types.

Schema: http://www.freebase.com/view/domain/user/jeff/default_domain
Example data: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/colmar_pocket

Jeff Prucher