[Data-modeling] playwright?

[Faye Harris]

I had to recently ponder this very thing. When asked what type best 
described /en/william_shakespeare, my answer was, why, 
/theater/playwright of course! What is that? We don't have 
/theater/playwright? Inconceivable! Why in the world would we have 
/book/poet and not /theater/playwright?

And that taught me two more things: 1) I have to stop blurting out 
(fictitious) types without verifying them on Freebase first, and 2) 
indeed, there's no /book/poet either.

Considering we have /tv/tv_writer and /film/writer, it did seem like a 
glaring inconsistency. The logic, as far as I could see, was actually 
based on the expected type, as well as the expected type of the 
reciprocal property. The expected type for the person who wrote a poem, 
book, play, short story etc. is /book/author, which does not have a 
property for every single category of writing in return, but simply 
expects /book/written_work, that then gets cotyped as book, poem, play, 
short story, short non-fiction, as appropriate It's much easier this way 
to ask for all things a person has written in a single property (more or 
less, series are via a second property).

I came to the conclusion that /tv/tv_writer and /film/writer are 
necessary because they expect /tv/tv_series_episode and /film/film, 
respectively. There's no common included type between a film and a TV 
episode, a sort of "written entertainment piece" if you will. If we did, 
then we could have gotten away with just a single "entertainment writer" 
type for both TV and film writers. For better or worse, type creation in 
Freebase is sometimes driven out of necessity of an expected type that 
makes sense.

-- Faye


Jon Reitsma wrote:
> But films are different?  Even films based on books can have screenwriters who aren't the book author.  Isn't the same true of a play?  Also not all plays are published and the Author type description, while including some plays, limits it to published plays and specifically says it is someone who has written a book. 
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jeff Prucher" <jeff at metaweb.com>
> To: "Freebase data modeling mailing list" <data-modeling at freebase.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 8, 2009 2:49:40 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] playwright?
>
> Well, he has a writing credit for the stage version now!  
>
> The nice thing about written work is the properties on it are common to many
> different types of works, including plays.  Adding a separate playwright
> property to Play would create a denormalization, since it would duplicate
> the Author property of written work.
>
> Jeff
>
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
>> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Jon Reitsma
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 2:41 PM
>> To: data-modeling at freebase.com
>> Subject: [Data-modeling] playwright?
>>
>> Does anyone else think we should add a Playwright property to 
>> Play?  We have Composer and Lyricist but what about the 
>> writer?  Instead it seems that the Written Work type has been 
>> added ass an included type.
>>
>> Personally I think it should be the same as how we treat 
>> screenwriters (what we call Film Writers).  A good example of 
>> one (of many) who have written both films and plays is Arthur 
>> Laurents:
>>
>> http://www.freebase.com/view/en/arthur_laurents
>>
>> Here you can see he has a number of film writing credits - 
>> even for the film version of West Side Story but no similar 
>> treatment for the stage version.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> j
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>>     
>
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