<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
-- Faye<br>
<br>
<br>
Jon Reitsma wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:992318087.60081239228872533.JavaMail.root@zimbra01.corp.sjc1.metaweb.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:jeff@metaweb.com"><jeff@metaweb.com></a>
To: "Freebase data modeling mailing list" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:data-modeling@freebase.com"><data-modeling@freebase.com></a>
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
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">-----Original Message-----
From: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:data-modeling-bounces@freebase.com">data-modeling-bounces@freebase.com</a>
[<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:data-modeling-bounces@freebase.com">mailto:data-modeling-bounces@freebase.com</a>] On Behalf Of Jon Reitsma
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 2:41 PM
To: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:data-modeling@freebase.com">data-modeling@freebase.com</a>
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:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.freebase.com/view/en/arthur_laurents">http://www.freebase.com/view/en/arthur_laurents</a>
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
_______________________________________________
Data-modeling mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Data-modeling@freebase.com">Data-modeling@freebase.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling">http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
_______________________________________________
Data-modeling mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Data-modeling@freebase.com">Data-modeling@freebase.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling">http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling</a>
_______________________________________________
Data-modeling mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Data-modeling@freebase.com">Data-modeling@freebase.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling">http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
</body>
</html>