[Data-modeling] Proposed change to locations

[Bryan Cheung]

Currently, some location types have properties to represent values  
from other location naming authorities, such as NIST FIPS 10.4, GNIS  
Feature ID, ISO 3166 codes and others.  These values, in most cases  
are represented as a machine readable string, and could possibly be  
non-unique in freebase (two topics having the same value).

It has been proposed that we update the property to be an enumeration,  
thereby giving us the ability to have the naming authority key map to  
a single topic.  It will also have the additional benefit of being  
able to reference the topic by URI; for example, www.freebase.com/view/iso/3166_1alpha3/MEX 
  (this link is not active yet).

The properties that we have identified so far as candidates for  
enumeration are:

/location/location/gnis_feature_id
/location/location/gns_ufi
/location/country/iso_alpha_3
/location/country/iso_numeric
/location/country/fifa_code
/location/country/iso3166_1_alpha2
/location/country/fips10_4
/location/administrative_division/fips_10_4_region_code
/location/administrative_division/iso_3166_2_code

I'll also be looking into whether some of these properties should be  
updated to be unique vs. non-unique.

There should not be any affect to queries you are writing against  
these properties.  You can read and update values just as you are  
doing currently, but if you are using the property's expected type in  
your query, that will change to /type/enumeration .

We're also evaluating types/properties in other domains as to whether  
they will also be good candidates for enumeration, but we'll let you  
know of those changes in another email.

Does anyone object?

Bryan