[Developers] GUIDs in data dump

[Will Fitzgerald]

Thanks, Alec. Let's consider this a bit more. As you know, we're relying on
Freebase for a lot of our name data, and we would like to guarantee as much
as possible the stability of a handle to a particular entity over time.

Let¹s consider the comedian and actor, Steve Martin (just to take a name at
random ...), We'd like a handle for this person that remains stable.

In the March 2008 download, his id is OE/topic/en/steve_martin¹
In the June 2008 download, his id will be OE/en/steve_martin¹

because of changing  "/topic/en" to "/en" [1].

You wrote in [1]:

³To be clear, this is a one-time change while we're still in alpha. We
really, really don't expect to do another system-wide change like
this, especially once we're out of alpha.²

This all implies that ids are pretty stable, but not guaranteed stable.

So, I have a few questions:

(1) Are ids meant to be unique (that is, there is an ideal 1-1 mapping
between ids and entities)?

(2) Will ids change would only change in a 'system-wide change'?

(3) Will ids that are 'guidy' change? (for example,
guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000006c3aa3, the id for "Norway women's national
football team"; or 'guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000a92044' for "Adam Bomb").
(This is orthogonal to merges and splits).



Will
---

[1] http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/developers/2008-March/001423.html

On 6/27/08 1:22 PM, "Alec Flett" <alecf at metaweb.com> wrote:

> I'm curious why you need guids, specifically. id's in general are more
> stable (they survive topic merges/splits, etc)
>
> Alec
>
> On Jun 26, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Will Fitzgerald wrote:
>
>> It would be very useful to have the Freebase GUIDs in the quarterly
>> data
>> dump. Is it too late to ask for such a thing?
>>
>> Will Fitzgerald
>>
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