[Data-modeling] Visual Art Form - an enumerated type?

[Faye Li]

The "Visual Art Form" type was designed with the intention of holding 
only high-level art forms, of which there are only a handful -- thus the 
enumeration designation. However, people apparently desire specificity 
when talking about art forms. One of the lessons in data modeling is 
that schema needs to grow and adapt to fit the data, not the other way 
around, so perhaps it's time we re-examine the "Visual Art Form" type.

In general, I have to say, I'm cautious regarding creating hierarchical 
data models where the line between hierarchies may be blurred at times. 
I've seen things with genres and sub genres and the same data often end 
up in both buckets. The hierarchy also creates problems in reverse 
properties. Should the expected type be the parent type ("genre") or the 
child type ("sub genre"), or some third type created just to include 
both of them?

Also contributing to the confusion of data belonging to parent/child 
types is that there is no automatic propagation, by which I mean if we 
want to designate Topic C as a sub category of Topic B, even though 
Topic B is already marked as a sub category of Topic A, Topic C is not 
automatically added as a sub category of Topic A, even though the 
relationship is clearly transitive. The data can get messy really quickly.

-- Faye


Jeff Prucher wrote:
> That's a good question. It seems like the art form type is pretty broad;
> i.e., it includes not only sculpture but also relief and bas-relief. I
> thought at first that this type was only used for the very high-level
> artform (e.g., sculpture, painting, photogrpahy, etc.), in which case an
> enumeration would make more sense -- there are probably only a couple dozen
> or so such options.  But since the type really does seem to include varying
> levels of specificity, I'd be inclined to say that it shouldn't be an
> enumeration, either.
>
> This also raises the question of whether this type needs a phylogeny
> pattern. I.e., a pair of parent/child or superclass/subclass properties.  So
> we could say that "bas-relief" is a variety of "relief" which is itself a
> variety of "sculpture".
>
> Jeff Prucher
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
>> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Bobby Rullo
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 6:22 PM
>> To: Freebase data modeling mailing list
>> Subject: [Data-modeling] Visual Art Form - an enumerated type?
>>
>> Should Visual Art Form be an enumeration? The client doesn't 
>> allow you to add types which are enumerations when you click 
>> "Add a Type", and this seems like something that changes 
>> relatively frequently.
>>
>> Bobby
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>
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