tadhg.com » freebase

More Versatile Freebase Views

Tadhg — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:28:17 +0000

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the latest upgrade to freebase.com (which I work on), because it makes much more interesting saved views possible with our UI. Previously, all kinds of interesting queries were possible using our query language, MQL, but to present their output you’d effectively need to write your own application. Now you can make queries using the UI and then have them displayed intelligently on Freebase.

Some time ago I created a Film adaptations of Hamlet view, and now I can also have a Film Adaptations of Shakespeare Works view. There aren’t that many in that list, so I suspect that a lot of films are missing—if you spot some, you can add them fairly easily.

I created a view of Books by Nobel Literature Prize Winners, which is of interest to me, and which I’m not sure would be too easy to find elsewhere. Again, it might be incomplete… but adding data is easy.

I was going to add some other literary award-based views, but I think I need to add a bunch of data for those awards first; while tinkering with one of those, I discovered (and corrected) the fact that Freebase considered Samuel Beckett to be French but not Irish…

Finally, I created Games Using an id Tech Engine, for all the Doom and Quake aficionados out there.

The major advantage of these lists, of course, is that they don’t have to be explicitly maintained—as soon as a new author is marked as having won the Nobel Prize for Literature, all of their works in the system will show up in the Books by Nobel Literature Prize Winners. As soon as a new film is marked as an adaptation of Hamlet, it will show up in both the Film adaptations of Hamlet and Film Adaptations of Shakespeare Works views, without my having to do anything.

I’m sure there are many more interesting and/or complicated views out there, and I’m pretty happy to be able to ones like those I just listed.

Tags: freebase, semantic-web, tech

Book List

Tadhg — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:56:45 +0000

I haven’t got any graphs, despite what I said last time. I had some, but messed them up while experimenting with Flot, and in any case they weren’t quite what I wanted. However, I did solve some of the other issues I was having with my book-tracking application, and am relatively happy with the current view.

It’s still not all that exciting, but I like having the information in one place, and I like the fact that I now have in one nice view all the books I’ve read so far this year.

One thing made abundantly clear by this list is that I my reading is incredibly biased towards male authors. There are 59 books by 61 authors on that list, and only six authors are definitely female; if I count K. J. Parker as female, that would still only bring it up to nine. Either 10.34% or 14.75%, in other words. Considering that a) the book I’m currently reading is Dumas’ Twenty Years Later and b) of the twelve books that I just got from Amazon only one is written by a woman—The Fall of the Kings, which is technically written by two women, but still—it doesn’t look like that ratio is going to get much better this year, and is likely to be worse.

I’ve been aware of this tilt in my reading habits for a while, but haven’t really been able to do anything about it. I don’t tend to notice the gender of the author all that much while I’m reading, and my experience of reading books written by women hasn’t led me to believe that I’d prefer books by men (or women—it’s felt quite neutral). Nevertheless, I seem to end up reading a lot more by men. I don’t know what the gender split in actual books published is, but I suspect it’s better than my ratio.

I’ll have to make more of an effort, I suppose, to get a better balance. I intend to try some Lois McMaster Bujold next year—if I end up reading a lot of her work, I’ll definitely have a much higher proportion of women-written books.

My suspicion, however, is that over time, if I don’t make a conscious effort, I’ll tend towards reading 80%-plus male-written books. While that’s not a terrible thing in itself, I’d like to understand better why that is.

(Actually, after finishing this post I realized that a second book in that bunch from Amazon is written by a woman: Melissa Roth’s The Left Stuff. Which also reminds me to lobby again to have handedness included in the person schema. How to then get that data for entry into Freebase is another question, but I would of course love to see my reading ratio for left-handed versus right-handed authors…)

Tags: books, coding, freebase, personal, reading, web-development

Fun with Books and Data Models

Tadhg — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:56:28 +0000

Fun might be the wrong word.

(Also, this is long. Condensed: I’ve been using Freebase to store my reading data, I wrote an Acre app to provide a custom view, and I discovered that my data model has some shortcomings.)

I’ve been playing with Acre some more, specifically on a long-term project of mine: to store data about the books I read in some system and then create views about my reading habits. Yes, compulsive list-making combined with programming/data geekery.

Anyway, I could have used a lot of other systems, such as Delicious Library or LibraryThing or Books, to store this information, but none of them seemed to have quite what I want (and most of them are proprietary). I could have written my own, and planned to, but kept tweaking with the data model and generally wasn’t sure how I wanted to deal with it.

I was going down the path of having objects for Books, instances of Books, Book reading events, and Authors. Then I encountered Freebase—I said that this has been a long-term project—and decided that I like the data model in its Publishing domain.

The relevant Freebase types for me are:
Book
Book Edition
Written Work
Author

Written Work is an included type for Book, so whenever you assert that something is a Book, the Freebase frontend asserts that it is also a Written Work. I considered Written Work to essentially be part of Book for my purposes.

I’ve been keeping track, in text files, the books that I read for quite some time. I’ve gradually increased the information I gather about each one, so that what was originally just date started, date finished, title, author, and whether or not I’d read the book before, has become this:

07. 29/03/2008; Matter; Iain M. Banks
593 pages; started 28/03/2008; 2008; Orbit, New York Feb 2008; ISBN-10: 0316005363; ISBN-13: 9780316005364; FBG: 9202a8c04000641f80000000091ceee6;

The last part, the most recent addition, stands for FreeBase Guid—that is, if you tack /guid/ onto the front of it, you have a Freebase identifier. One of many ways to use this is to just put the Freebase view address in front of it, like so: http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000091ceee6, which gives you the link to the Freebase page for the edition of Matter that I read in March this year.

The reason that edition is in there is because I added it. Freebase doesn’t have fantastic coverage for book data yet (thought that may change), so at the moment I manually enter the edition data, and occasionally the book data, for each book I read.

So, once all that is in the system, there should be some way for me to tag the books that I’ve read. The easiest way to do this would be to create a type, something like “Books Tadhg has read”, with the date properties. I don’t like that approach because Freebase types are a little like tags, and my addition of this type to a topic would show up for everyone, which strikes me as a little like pollution (because I assume that details on what I’ve been reading are not as fascinating to everyone as they are to me and, no doubt, the readers of this blog).

Instead, I created the types Book Edition Reader and Book Edition Reading Event. Before going into that, let me explain why I used Book Edition instaed of Book—it’s mainly because I want the easiest path to the data that’s relevant to me, which is the data that I capture myself as in those two lines above indicating when I read Matter, how long it was, where it was published, and so on. Because a Book Edition can refer to only one Book, it seemed an easier path to specify just the Book Edition, from which the Book can later be extracted, whereas if I specified Book, I would also have to specify which Book Edition of that Book I meant. Book Edition, then, was the approach.

My approach is more convoluted than adding a type to every Book Edition, but still fairly simple. The Book Edition Reader type is attached to a person, and takes Book Edition Reading Event in a property that expects a list of things. Book Edition Reading Event has the reader (me, since nobody else has used this so far, although it’s there for anyone who wants it), the start date, the end date, and the Book Edition read.

Simple. Once it’s all in there, I can get the list of Book Editions I’ve read with a straightforward query, like this one:


{
"book_editions_read" : [
  {
    "book_edition" : {
      "id" : null,
      "name" : null,
      "type" : "/book/book_edition"
    },
    "end_date" : null,
    "sort" : "end_date",
    "start_date" : null,
    "type" : "/user/tadhg/tbooks/book_edition_reading_event"
  }
],
"id" : "/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000004904c64",
"type" : "/user/tadhg/tbooks/book_edition_reader"
}

Using the Freebase frontend's view capabilities, I can get a simple list pretty easily.

However, what I really want is something that exposes data about the book (as well as the edition), such as genre and subject, and the author, such as gender and nationality. A bunch of work with Acre got me to this (incomplete) view of books I've read this year.

So, it all looked good, and while it's a little slower than I would like, it's not the kind of thing I anticipate wanting really quick results from. But, as I was entering more books from this year, I ran into a snag—my data model is flawed as a way to represent the data I capture in my text files.

The reason is that what I consider a "book" isn't necessarily a physical book (which is what Book Edition maps to), but something more conceptual, a difference clearly exposed when I read a book that's contained in a collection. A collection such as Viriconium, which contains three M. John Harrison novels and a book of M. John Harrison short stories, and which my text file records represent as:
37. 04/08/2008; The Pastel City; M. John Harrison
108 pages; started 04/08/2008; 1971; [Viriconium; Bantam Spectra/Random House, New York November 2005; ISBN-10: 0553383159; ISBN-13: 9780553383157; FBG: 9202a8c04000641f8000000008dd71df]
38. 05/08/2008; Storm of Wings; M. John Harrison
146 pages; started 05/08/2008; 1980; [Viriconium; Bantam Spectra/Random House, New York November 2005; ISBN-10: 0553383159; ISBN-13: 9780553383157; FBG: 9202a8c04000641f8000000008dd71df]
39. 06/08/2008; In Viriconium; M. John Harrison
86 pages; started 05/08/2008; [Viriconium; Bantam Spectra/Random House, New York November 2005; ISBN-10: 0553383159; ISBN-13: 9780553383157; FBG: 9202a8c04000641f8000000008dd71df]
40. 06/08/2008; Viriconium Nights; M. John Harrison
121 pages; started 06/08/2008; [Viriconium; Bantam Spectra/Random House, New York November 2005; ISBN-10: 0553383159; ISBN-13: 9780553383157; FBG: 9202a8c04000641f8000000008dd71df]

The Book Edition is clearly the Viriconium collection. But if I enter that as a Book Edition Read, there's no way to denote which of the parts I read, or that there are four books (by my definition) in there. Furthermore, the numbers from my text files and the Freebase data would differ, and that's clearly not acceptable.

Right now, I only see one way around this, which muddies my data model somewhat: to include Written Work as one of the properties of Book Edition Reading Event, so that I'd be entering both the Book Edition and the Written Work—but could leave Written Work blank if it's just pointing to the Book that Book Edition points to. Then, I need some special-case code where if it's not the same as what the Book Edition is pointing to, I go fetch the data about the Written Work instead. It's just one property, but it makes it harder for other people to use the type (and I'd like to leave that option open), and it definitely increases the code complexity. However, I don't see another answer that satisfies these self-imposed requirements.

Therefore it's back to work on this, just at the point where I thought I'd fixed the basic data-entry, data-display, and data-model problems and could have some fun working on graphing out a variety of more-or-less pointless stuff—instead, I have to try to jam the anthology special case into the existing code framework.

Once that's done, though, there will be graphs, yes there will.

Tags: books, freebase, reading, web-development

Acre Family Chart

Tadhg — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:51:18 +0000

Freebase recently got a hosted development environment, Acre, and I’ve been playing with it. It makes it quite easy to develop applications using Freebase data (which is the point), and I’m eager to write some of those applications myself.

As a test case, and an exploration of how views tailored to specific Freebase types can expose the richness of the data in ways that the web client I work on usually can’t, I put together a basic family tree visualizer. It shows direct relatives of whoever you focus on, that is their parents, siblings, children, and spouses. It also shows grandparents, just to make it a little more interesting.

Its operation is simple: find a person using the FreebaseSuggest box in the upper left, and click on any person to load a page with them at the center. Clicking on the person in the center, or on the [e] links, brings you to that person in Freebase for editing.

The UI needs quite a lot of work, as it looks fairly awful. I might be able to get some help with that this week, and there are certainly a lot of refinements to be made. But as my first work with Acre, I’m happy with it.

While it does show off some of the data in Freebase, it may actually be more useful in showing what data we don’t have in there yet. There are a lot of historical figures whose parentage is widely known but which Freebase doesn’t yet know. Ideally you’d be able to add that kind of thing directly from the app, without having to go to Freebase.com, but that functionality is quite far away…

If you’re curious about building apps, try out the app editor; the source code for my family chart is available, as is code for other Acre applications.

Some potentially interesting other family charts:
Louse XIV of France
JFK
George W. Bush
Elizabeth II of England
James I of England

(The political/royalist bias here is sadly necessary since those appear to be the richest pockets of data…)

Tags: freebase, web-development

Freebase: Films Adapted from Books in the Last Decade

Tadhg — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:37:36 +0000

I’m usually pleased when I stumble across questions that it seems can only be answered by Freebase or a lot of work—even though I don’t see Freebase as being primarily for casual searching/browsing in the way that Wikipedia is, it’s always nice when I come up with a casual question (one that might come up in conversation, say) that suits the site very well.

In this case, after reading The Bourne Identity, I started wondering about films based on books that are better than the original book. I consider The Bourne Identity film to be better than the book by some distance, and might blog about that at some point, but first I wondered how rare it was. Freebase can’t answer that directly, obviously, but I thought it could give me a list to work with. I wanted to restrict it to the last ten years, to make it easier, and it wasn’t hard to write a query to do just that:

[
  {
    "/media_common/adaptation/adapted_from" : [
      {
        "name" : null,
        "other:type" : {
          "id" : "/comic_books/comic_book_story",
          "optional" : "forbidden"
        },
        "type" : "/book/book"
      }
    ],
    "id": null,
    "initial_release_date" : null,
    "initial_release_date>=" : "1998",
    "name" : null,
    "second:type" : "/media_common/adaptation",
    "sort" : "name",
    "type" : "/film/film"
  }
]

The stuff with “other:type” is in there to filter out films based on comics, since I didn’t want to consider those in my musings.

There are 90 candidates in Freebase. I haven’t gone through them exhaustively, but collating them that way is a lot better than trying to figure out the list by going through every film released in the last ten years and checking to see if they’re adaptations of books. Even given that Freebase is likely to miss some, it’s better this way than wading through all the IMDB entries or similar.

Tags: film, freebase, tech

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