[Developers] type checking?

[Arthur van Hoff]

Just for kicks I added the postal code 94025 as founder of the NPR radio
station. I don't understand why a postal code is allowed to also be a
company founder and a person. Maybe you need to explain more clearly why
this is a good thing...

My concern is that if we want the public to contribute freely to the
data base, then there needs to be a type system that is actually
enforced. Otherwise it will end up in a mess that will be very difficult
to untangle.

I would have expected that adding a new type to a topic would require an
explicit action, one that is only allowed in certain cases. But instead
it appears that it is an implicit (and often undesired) side effect of
accidentally selecting the wrong item from a list when editing an
unrelated type. 

By the way, undoing this is much harder than it would first appear. If
you do it in the wrong order you end up with a property pointing to an
object of the wrong type, which appears in the database, but not in the
UI. This will break my application, which expects the property to only
refer to objects of the correct type.

-----Original Message-----
From: developers-bounces at freebase.com
[mailto:developers-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Kirrily Robert
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 11:37 PM
To: For discussions about MQL,Freebase API and apps built on Freebase
Subject: Re: [Developers] type checking?

On Dec 2, 2007 12:03 PM, Arthur van Hoff <AVH at zing.net> wrote:
> When adding a genre to an podcast I accidentally picked National
Public
> Radio from the popup list. The expected type for the was
> /user/cotton/default_domain/broadcast_genre, and NPR was not of that
type.
> Why does the site allow me to pick a topics that is not of the correct
type?
> Can't it restrict the list to just the valid type for that property?

As they say in the classics: "That's a feature, not a bug!"

John's described the reasoning behind it, but I'll just add that if
you want to revert your mistake properly, you have to do it in two
places:

1) remove the genre from the list on the podcast's page
2) remove the type "podcast genre" from the NPR page

Annoying I know, but the ability to add types to topics really is one
of freebase's strongest features!

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
skud at infotrope.net
http://infotrope.net
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