[Freebase-discuss] Library of Congress subject headings

[Tom Morris]

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Brian Karlak <zenkat at metaweb.com> wrote:
>
> On May 8, 2010, at 11:36 PM, Iain Sproat wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, they're very visible - the Battle of Bulgneville popped
>> up in autocomplete and I linked to it.
>> http://www.freebase.com/history/view/authority/us/gov/loc/sh/
>> sh94002298
>> I've cleaned it up, but I assume I shouldn't have been able to do that
>> in the first place?
>
> Ahhh, I see.  I had poked around trying to get these to show up in the
> client, but I hadn't tried the obvious route of data entry.  Now Tom's
> question about the behavior of suggest vs. autocomplete makes a whole
> lot more sense.
>
> In many ways, this seems like a variant of the incompatible types
> problem.  Just as we shouldn't show Book topics when asking for a Film
> property, we shouldn't show Subject Heading nodes when linking up
> topics (except for Book Subjects, of course).

I don't understand the exception here.  The target type for a book
subject is Literature Subject, not SKOS Concept or LoC Subject
Heading.  I'm willing to suspend disbelief and assume that there will
be a way to segregate these things entirely, but you can't then turn
around and have them leak through the wall without totally confusing
everyone.

When I'm working on
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/basidiobolus_ranarum and want to add
the genus Basidiobolus as its parent, I have to create a new topic
(because Freebase doesn't have a topic for the genus), but if I'm
writing a book about these fungi, the subject is the existing LoC
Basidiobolus subject
http://www.freebase.com/view/authority/us/gov/loc/sh/sh85012086 ?  I
think that's going to be hard for people to keep straight in their
heads.

Tom