[Developers] Awards refactoring

[Jeff Prucher]

I'm cross-posting to the developers list because this proposal touches on
the type keys in the awards domain, which might affect developers.

There is a problem in the current awards schema. There is no way to group
categories of awards together under the same general award. For example,
there are topics for every Academy Award category (best picture, best
original screenplay, etc.) of type "award", but there is no way to assert
that all these awards are the same sort of award. So if you want to know
which picture has won the most Academy Awards, you have to query against
every academy award topic, do some kind of string matching against the topic
name, or go by the awarding organization. (This last one wouldn't work,
actually -- different Nobels are technically awarded by different groups,
and some organizations sponsor multiple awards.)

So I'm proposing (well, this was Faye's idea, really) that we add a new type
that will connect to both "award" and "award presenting organization". This
would ordinarily be a very simple thing to do. The problem is with the
nomenclature. From a practical standpoint, the new type (i.e., for the
general "Academy Award") should be called simply "award", and the old type
(i.e., for the specific category, "Academy Award for Best Foo") should be
renamed "award category". I'm pretty satisfied with making that change, but
I'd like to hear other suggestions.

My main concern with the naming I'm proposing is that the type keys might be
a problem. The type "award category" (formerly known as "award") has a key
of /award/award. The new type "award" can't use that, since keys are unique,
so it would have to have some weirdly-named key. This is doable, just
inelegant and probably confusing to anyone who tries to write queries using
the keys. The alternative would be to move the /award/award key to the new
"award" and create a new key for "award category", but this would completely
break any code that uses this schema, which is not something I'm too keen on
doing.

The Academy Awards (type = award):
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/academy_awards

Academy Award for Best Director (type = award category):
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/academy_award_for_best_director

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (type= award presenting
organization)
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/academy_of_motion_picture_arts_and_scien
ces

Thoughts on how best to proceed?

Jeff Prucher
Type Librarian & Ontologist
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.