[Data-modeling] Types for subjects

[John Giannandrea]

perhaps this could be a generic function of /common/topic.
'films about this topic" etc.

-jg

On Jul 2, 2009, at 12:35 PM, Jeff Prucher wrote:

> <http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000b912218>
>
> This is a thread in which it is proposed that we collapse all the  
> various
> media subject types (book subject, film subject, etc.) into one big  
> (new)
> Media Subject type.  Functionally, this would result in one type  
> with many
> properties, rather than many types with one property each.
>
> The main advantage I can see to this is that users wouldn't have to  
> add new
> types if they wanted to indicate that a topic was a subject of a  
> type it
> didn't already have (that is, if you wanted to say that a particular  
> radio
> program had a subject of, say, "Porcupines", but the Porcupine topic  
> was
> only the subject of a book currently, you wouldn't have to add the  
> type
> "Radio Subject" -- you could just fill in the property).
>
> A minor advantage _might_ be that people creating types in bases  
> would have
> a type they could all reference if they had a new type that needed a  
> subject
> property. Although this also has the disadvantage that these  
> properties
> would not be reciprocated, whereas if the user created a new "foo  
> subject"
> type, it would be.
>
> This would also be a fairly major change, since we'd be nuking a lot  
> of
> types, which would potentially break all kinds of things (we could  
> keep the
> old property keys, but I'm not sure about the type keys). It also has
> implications for other places where similar patterns exist (media  
> genres and
> ficitional characters are two that come to mind).
>
> What do you think about this?
>
> Jeff
>
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