[Data-modeling] Events, again

[Kirrily Robert]

Just wanted to bring back the thread about events (/time/event) and related types.

Based on various discussions and some attempts to mentally model how it'd all work, here's what I'd like to do for now:

1) remove the types "Historic period" and "Historic event".  They are really just events (though, in the case of historical periods, long-running ones.)  Anything that is currently typed as one of these things should be typed as "event" instead.

2) modify the "event" type by removing "people involved".  This should be specified in more detail in related types.  Eg. "military conflict", which should become a kind of "event", already has properties for "commander", which is more useful in that context.

3) continue discussion of a generic "timeline" type, which would allow the aggregation of events into arbitrary interesting groups.  For instance, you could have a timeline of volcanic eruptions, or of major wars through history, or of dynasties in ancient Egypt.  There was some discussion about this at http://www.freebase.com/view/discuss/time#/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000006f4819e if you're interested in reading the thread.  The problem with timelines is that it's hard to include eg. "birth of Albert Einstein" without creating an event for that, whereas ordinarily in freebase we'd just look at the "date of birth" property on the person to get their birthdate.  And I really don't think we want to promote all dates in the system to be events, do we?  Anyway, worth discussion, but can happen separately from the two points above.

Thoughts/comments/objections?

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com