With the latest release, you may notice a new menu bar at the top of some topic pages. This introduces a way for users, or groups of users, to create a focused view of a topic, without displaying extraneous data.
When you search for something on Freebase, you’ll generally come to the commons (standard) view for that topic. If there are types associated with a topic that belong to a domain that hasn’t been promoted to root (for instance, one in a user’s namespace), then a link is provided to view the topic within that domain. (Note: this doesn’t apply to types in default user namespaces)
For example, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company has various ‘commons’ types such as Company and Employer. It also displays the types from spatialed’s Motorcycle domain.
By clicking on the link in the domain header to view the topic in the motorcycle domain, the view is now limited to only the properties of type topic (title, article, image, …) and those types in spatialed’s domain (motorcycle manufacturer, etc…).
This not only provides a more focused view, but could potentially allow for more experimentation. You could even imagine two different motorcycle domains existing, with somewhat different type definitions. Instead of having those properties appear (and possibly conflict) on the common topic view, all the types within a particular domain could appear on a dedicated view for that topic.
The plan we’ve been working with suggests a set of community developed domains that will drive these different views. There is quick access provided back to that domain from this new view – and these types’ properties can appear whether or not the types themselves have been ‘published’.
We’re interested in your thoughts about this approach. Specifically: Does this approach to publishing types make sense? Do you think that user-created types (and their associated properties) should always appear on the commons topic view? Would it be useful to have these domain views applied to even the domains already in the commons (see Bob Dylan in the film domain, for instance)? Comments on this Blog posting or replies to related threads on our email lists are probably the best way to provide feedback.
April 6th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I was confused by the presentation of this idea.
The following concepts are discussed or displayed
root
‘commons’ types
commons (standard) view
common topic view
Freebase Commons
Common domain
Which of these names represent distinct concepts?
The page the let’s you select between “Freebase Commons” and “other domain”, which suggests that Freebase Commons is a domain, but it isnt.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Thanks for the comment. We’re trying some language out. Feedback is always welcome. It sounds like you found some of it confusing. ‘Commons’ seemed like a good name for the concept to some of us here, but we would welcome other ideas.
We omitted the word ‘domain’ when describing the commons in the UI, since it represents all the domains that appear at the root. I understand how using ‘other’ could imply that commons is a domain, so we’ll consider whether there is other language that could be clearer without sacrificing brevity.
The word root was used only once and this was to describe what the commons is comprised of. While descriptive, I think ‘root domains’ is much too technical a way to describe it for a broader audience — hoping ‘commons’ works better.
I don’t think ‘Common domain’ was used anywhere in this help topic… though Common it is one of the existing root domains. Your point there may be that this could confuse people, but I’m not sure very many people know or care about the common domain — its probably not essential that we promote it.
All this to say, I’d encourage anyone reading this post with an opinion to weigh in on the language — this blog post isn’t intended to be documentation – when we do write documentation on this feature, we’ll be sure to be more consistent with the language.