With the latest release, there are a number of changes to the way types are published and how they show up on topic pages. We thought it would be worth pulling together a blog post to describe them in some detail. They should make type publishing more convenient and also allow for more customization for domain owners down the road.

• What hasn’t changed – When a type is ‘published’ its properties appear on the standard Freebase topic view. When a type isn’t published, its properties don’t appear.
• Types are no longer published individually in schema editor – instead the status is set at the domain level. All the types within a given domain are either ‘draft’ or ‘published’ depending on visibility settings selected by the domain administrator.
• Types in a user’s default domain are generally always draft – the default domain is intended as a scratchpad — a place to experiment with type creation. If you’d like to publish one or more types in your default domain, simply move them* into another domain that you administer. If you don’t yet administer any other domains, feel free to create a new one.
• * The ‘move types’ option is listed on the domain page in a menu next to the ‘edit’ button in the browse types section on the left.
• Types in other domains are published by default – any new domains created will be published by default. So you can effectively publish types in a draft domain by creating a new domain and then moving these types into it. You can choose to move a domain (and its types) back into draft status if you want to hide those types without moving them. This is done by modifying the visibility settings in the upper right.
• Topics containing draft types can now be viewed by anyone – previously these types would only show up to the user who created the type, which made it hard to share and collaborate a type that was a work in progress. Now you simply need to navigate to the topic from the domain or type page and it will present the topic in a specialized view that can be viewed by anyone.
  • For instance, here’s an example draft domain I created. If you click on one of these topics you can see the type (and properties) I created, even though the type is in a draft domain. If you click on the ‘full view’ icon at the bottom of the page you’ll be taken to the standard Freebase topic view and this draft type won’t appear. Previously, I was the only person who could have looked at this view — now I can share it with someone else if I need to.

These changes should make it easier to work collaboratively on types in Freebase. Feedback and comments about the changes are encouraged!