[Data-modeling] Types for subjects

[Jeff Prucher]

How would this work?  Practically any topic is a potential subject, so I can
see the appeal of using /common/topic there, but how would incoming
properties work?  Either there'd need to be two properties on /common/topic
-- "subjects" and "subject of" (a phylogeny pattern), or there'd have to be
a single "subject-having thing" type to connect to it. Or is there another
way?  

Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of John 
> Giannandrea
> Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 12:46 PM
> To: Freebase data modeling mailing list
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] Types for subjects
> 
> 
> 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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