[Developers] Announcement of upcoming schema changes

[Jeff Prucher]

Unless there is serious objection, we will be making the following changes
to existing types next week. Please let us know if you have any objections
to or questions about these changes.  The specific changes, and rationale
for them, are provided below. We hope to keep such changes to a minimum, but
as we have moved through alpha, a variety of issues with some schemas have
been discovered, and we are hoping to resolve as many of them as possible
before we reach beta.  All such changes will be announced on these lists,
and we will take any concerns or objections from the community into
consideration before making them.

1) Government domain

The type "US Political Office Held" (/government/us_political_office_held)
will be deleted. Current instances will be migrated to "Government office
held" (/government/government_position_held).

The following types have been deprecated and will be removed (spellings of
key names are 'sic'):

    * /government/us_cogressional_commitee_session
    * /government/us_legistlative_session
    * /government/us_congress_commitee_assignment
    * /government/committee_role 

This is part of an ongoing process to make the types in the government
domain work for all government types, rather than requiring distinct types
for every country (which is how they were originally set up). These changes
are the result of the process announced here in October. There may be one or
two additional sets of changes required before the process is complete.


2) Theater domain

The following types have been deprecated and will be removed:

    * /theater/theater_award
    * /theater/theater_award_honor
    * /theater/theater_award_winner
    * /theater/theater_award_nomination
    * /theater/theater_award_nominee 

The following properties have been deprecated and will be removed:

    * /theater/theater_production/awards_won
    * /theater/theater_production/award_nominations
    * /theater/play/awards_won
    * /theater/play/award_nominations 

These types and properties are being deleted because they have been
superseded by the types in the "award" domain. There is currently no data in
these types, so we expect that this will have a minimal impact.

Jeff Prucher, on behalf of the Data Architecture team 
Metaweb, Inc.