[Data-modeling] Type for groups/sets of people (or any entity?)

[Robert Cook]

So, Kirrily mentioned this type:

http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/freebase/list?domain=%2Ffreebase

which is intended to be a very generic collection holder.  Some of the  
properties include:

Entities -- the "members" of the list
Related type -- The types these members should be.  This helps guide  
autocomplete and potentially autotyping as items are added.
Category -- the kind of list this is "Favorite films", "Jazz musicians  
with substance abuse problems", etc.

What's key here is that this allows a definition of loose semantics.   
A List Category is like a property without a type, and it's optional  
(a list can be a one-off).

Also the Entities property is mediated -- that is, there is a mediator  
node between the list and the member topic.  This may be overkill for  
the cases you're describing, but it's a kind of lowest common  
denominator -- it allows you to encode both simple and mediated  
relationships with the same pattern.

R

On Jul 20, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Tom Morris wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Iain Sproat<iainsproat at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> I'd recently thrown together a 'people' type for this purpose.   
>> Cane & Abel,
>> Brangelina and the Olsen twins are currently typed as such.
>
> That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about (although the name
> "people" seems a little awkward to me).
>
>> But it feels like a quick hack, as it doesn't define any sort of
>> relationship between the person and the group.  e.g. employee,  
>> spouse,
>> sibling, band member etc..
>
> The advantage of keeping it lightweight is that it can be reused more
> widely.  Any cases where the nature of the relationship among group
> members is important can be modeled with a more heavyweight structure.
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:41 PM,  
> evening0star<evening0star at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Have nothing to add other than there's a table of people with "and"  
>> in
>> the topic title for possible splits on To Do Lists base.
>
> Yup, that would be one of the initial applications -- to allow those
> to be split while still retaining the topic which describes them
> collectively and links back to Wikipedia AND allowing navigation
> between the group and the individual members.
>
> Tom
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling