[Data-modeling] Events, again

[Kirrily Robert]

Wrt periods... how's this for an idea. We retain "historic period" for semantic/typing purposes but just make it include "event" so it gets start/end dates, locations, and inclusion properties. It wouldn't have any special properties of its own, and its relationship to historic events would be purely through "includes event". 

K. 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ryan Shaw" <ryanshaw at ischool.berkeley.edu> 
To: "Freebase data modeling mailing list" <data-modeling at freebase.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 2:28:13 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles 
Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] Events, again 


On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:14 AM, Kirrily Robert < kirrily at metaweb.com > wrote: 



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. 


I agree that the "historic" modifiers should be removed, but I disagree that periods are just long-running events. An event is something that happened: even if we may not know exactly when or where it happened, in theory if we could go back in time and witness it we could establish a specific time and/or location. A period, on the other hand, is an abstraction. The classic example is the Renaissance. There is no "fact of the matter" about when or where the Renaissance occurred. Instead, it is an interpretive judgement, about which there may be more or less consensus, but no "truth." 


So I think that the distinction between event and period is worth keeping. Perhaps period could just become a marker for a kind of topic. Ideally there would be a way to associate a period with an approximate date range reflecting current consensus about the time range it describes (as opposed to the date(s) on an event which are a best guess about when something actually happened). 




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