[Data-modeling] More fun with the visual art domain

[Faye Li]

Thanks for putting this together, Jeff.

Have you considered making the "Artwork-owner relationship" a 
reciprocated property of "Art acquisition" type? The CVT makes it a 
little awkward to picture what that will look like, but I think there's 
value in seeing, at a glance, all the artworks that are gifts.

One of the trade-offs of having a single Artwork type for both unique 
artworks, edited artworks and editions of artworks is the confusing pair 
of properties "Edition of" and "Editions" that will be empty for 99% of 
all artworks. It will burn some primitives, but I think it might be 
worthwhile in the interest of cutting down confusion to insert the value 
of "None" for those 99% of artworks. It's also regrettable that you 
can't just query an "Edition" type to see all artwork editions, but have 
to query against the "Artwork" type for instances that have a value for 
property "Edition of". Oh well. I see the trade-offs and the reasons 
behind them.

I'll leave off my regular bits about CVTs not being search-friendly, as 
clearly the need outranks the compromised searchability here. Otherwise 
it looks good.

-- Faye


Jeff Prucher wrote:
> In response to a request on the visual arts discussion boards
> (http://www.freebase.com/view/discuss/visual_art/artwork#/guid/9202a8c040006
> 41f80000000072fa4ba), I've made some proposed changes to the artwork model,
> which I'd like to hear feedback on.
>
> There are three changes:
> 1) insertion of a CVT between artwork and location, to track when a piece
> has been where, and how long (insert standard discussion about time-series
> data here)
>
> 2) insertion of a CVT between artwork and owner. This includes not only
> dates, but the method it was acquired (e.g., purchase, gift, bequest), and
> the purchase price
>
> 3) the addition of an "editions" property on artwork (and the reverse
> property, "edition of", as well). The idea here is to allow Freebase to
> display information about editions of a specific artwork (such as casts of a
> sculpture, or prints of a photograph), which may have not only different
> locations and owners, but also dimensions, media, and dates of creation. I
> decided to model edition simply as "artwork" rather than "artwork edition"
> because of the desire for museums and other art owners to have only one
> property describing their holdings; an "artwork edition" type would have
> required two properties -- "artwork owned" and "artwork editions owned"
> which seemed unnecessarily clumsy. This does mean that the abstract version
> of the artwork and the individual edition will have a number of redundant
> properties, but my hope is that these can just be left blank. Naming of
> editions will be interesting, but that's an issue every time we model them.
>
> I've entered some casts of "The Thinker" (in bronze and plaster) on sandbox
> for your perusal. (I put the proposed types in a private domain, so all
> versions of The Thinker have both the original "artwork" type and a type
> with only the proposed additions, "artwork (test)"; pretend, if you will,
> that all the properties are one a single type. Let me know what you think. 
>
> Domain:
> http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/domain/user/jeff/visual_art
> Examples:
> http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/the_thinker
>
> Jeff Prucher
> Type Librarian & Ontologist
> Metaweb Technologies, Inc. 
>
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