And now — with your help — Freebase can, too!

http://detypewriter.freebaseapps.com/

Written by vtalwar, (de)Typewriter is a Typewriter-style application based upon our incompatible types definitions.  On a nightly basis, we check our topics against these rules.  Topics that have incompatible types are marked and flagged for review and cleanup.

That’s where you come in.  Cleanup of topics with incompatible types isn’t necessarily straightforward.  In some cases, the incompatibility is just caused by a simple mistyping — a book was mistakenly typed as a person, or a band was mistakenly typed as an album.  These cases are easy to fix: the offending type just needs to be removed.  There are other cases, however, which are more difficult to fix — for instance, in cases in which two entities were mistakenly merged. This requires that the offending topic be split into multiple topics, which is a much more involved process.

For instance, the band “Happy Mondays” is not and never will be a /people/person, so it needs to be detyped.  However, “Bob Dylan” can be both a /people/person, and his eponymous /music/album, so it would need to be split.(*)

Once we know which case we’re dealing with, we can make the fix.  But we need your to help us figure out which case we’re looking at.   Much like the Typewriter and Genderizer apps on which it’s based, the (de)Typewriter application walks you through a list of potential incompatibilities.  But in this case, our question is phrased differently:

First off, you’ll notice that we’re not asking about a particular Freebase topic.  That’s because we already know that the Los del Rio topic may have problems.  Instead, we want to know if somewhere, out there in the big wide world, if there is a person named Los del Rio.  If there is, then we know we have some split-like cleanup to do.  If there’s isn’t, however, then we know we can automatically remove the /people/person type from the Los del Rio topic.

For each question, you’ll get some clues.  On the left panel, you’ll see the results of a wikipedia search for that name.  On the right, you’ll have Google, IMDB, or Google Maps results.  Usually the answer will be obvious from these clues — but feel free to follow links if you think more information will help.

Try not to “overthink” the questions.  If the answer isn’t obvious (or if a question and/or its supporting clues seem confusing to you), just click “Skip” to go to the next question.  You can also get extra help by clicking the “Help” button, which will give you a discussion of the type’s usage as well as letting you know which incompatible type rule spawned this question.

Finally, note that unlike Typewriter and Genderizer, (de)Typewriter uses a vote tallying mechanism.  Detyping doesn’t occur immediately after clicking a button.  Instead, votes on the separate typings are compared to determine the proper course of action.

Have fun detyping!

Reconciliation gets better the more we know about the topics in Freebase, and one of the most important things to know is a topic’s types. That is, when we’re trying to match an author “Jane Smith”, it helps if we can limit our matching to people named Jane Smith that we already know are authors.

In short, typed topics make our data loads more effective.

We’re already working on typing 95% of the topics in Freebase. If you’d like to help out, and know that your efforts are going to be multiplied by the data team’s mass loads, you can help us by typing authors and books.

Using Typewriter, simply choose Author (15,349 items) or Book (9,323 items) from the list of types, and answer “Yes” or “No” for each topic.

Don’t forget, there’s also an iPhone app: great for that long commute or boring meeting!

For more background reading on our data loads, reconciliation, and human intelligence, check out:

• Meet the Freebase bots
• Partial evidence and human intelligence: a dispatch from the data mines

100% is hard — really hard — because there will always be an odd selection of topics that we don’t have types for, or that are new and not yet typed, or whatever. But 95% could be achievable, with time and dedication. And so, the 95% Typed Challege was born.

Here’s the deal: I’ll be blogging regularly about the status of typed topics in Freebase. Typed topics will be defined as those that have at least one Commons type other than /common/topic. I’ve got a public google spreadsheet that shows recent progress and current status. We’re at about 80% typed at the moment, which means that one in five Freebase topics is untyped.

To help us get more typed topics, we’ll run data mobs to work on particular areas of untyped topics. Let’s start with three today!

• Association (5072 instances) — most of these look like Organizations.
• Roman Catholic Diocese (1699 instances) — most of these are Religious Jurisdictions
• New Zealand (1348 instances) — these are a range of things, from governmental bodies to railways to locations

There are a few tools available to help you type these. The first is tfmorris’s Untyped Topics application. This simply lists 100 untyped topics that match any string, and you can then do what you like with them, like open each in a tab and use the Freebase.com website to “Add type”.

If you know that most of the topics will end up being of the same type (as in the diocese and association examples above), you might prefer spencermountain’s Keyword Typer. This allows you to specify a string to match on as well as a likely type. You’ll then be asked to confirm or skip the typing for each topic.

If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, please go type a few topics! As each of these areas is completed, we’ll post a new one.

Take a look at this timeline of results. The colours indicate the space programme responsible for the missions; for instance, all of China’s Shenzhou missions appear in dark brown, and if you scroll back to the 60s and 70s you can see the USSR and USA duking it out in the space race.

There are still a bunch of space missions that don’t have dates set, so if you have a moment you can help fill them in. Then you can see the fruits of your labours showing up in Parallax’s timelines.

Using this saved view of events with no dates associated with them, choose an event or events and add the dates. Easy!

Remember that you can sort or filter the list to find those things you’re most interested in. Try filtering on “name contains Battle” or exclude unwanted co-types using “Also typed with is not…”

For a bit of fun when you’re done, try using Parallax to view events on a timeline. Here’s one I made of military conflicts involving the US:

• Corporate casualties of the subprime lending crisis by arielb
• Theatres in London, England by freebass
• 80s films by barak
• Science Fiction Novels that have won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards combined and Film adaptations of Hamlet by tadhg
  Eddie Robinson award winning [American football] coaches by dylanrocks

Thanks to everyone to saved views this week; I’ll be using some of them as inspiration for future data mobs!

• Black actors who have portrayed God by jfry
• People typed as company, Fraternity/sorority typed as people, and Organizations typed as people, and Government agencies with null jurisdiction by evening
• Killer amusement park rides by alexander
• Companies founded after 2000 by masouras
• Trade union organizations with no geographic scope, These organizations need founding dates, and These events need dates by skud (i.e. yours truly)

Some of these are great examples of saved views that show places where more information can be filled in. Keep up the good work!

• Synagogues destroyed during Kristallnacht by arielb.
• Bridges missing length by zenkat
• Automobile companies without senior management, also by zenkat
• Women politicians with no country of nationality by evening
• Companies with no industry by evening
• Blogs with no focus nor website category by evening
• The highest pubs in England by freebass
• November 2008 elections by crism

Got any more?

Now it’s time to move from the concrete (no pun intended) to the abstract.

Ever since we launched our Filter/Table View we’ve noticed that when people see a partially filled table, they have the urge to fill the gaps. Now we have saved views, this becomes even better. You can create a view that demonstrates what needs to be filled in, and use it as a means of encouragement.

This week’s data mob is a little bit meta. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a saved view that shows an area of data that needs to be filled in.

Here are some I’ve created previously:

• Roman tourist attractions – please add construction dates!
• Chefs with no nationality specified
• Computer Science books (surely there are more than this!?)
• Environmental charities – do you know one that’s not listed here?

For any of these, if you can think of something that belongs on the list and isn’t there yet, simply click “Add…” at the top of the page. If you see a gap in the table that needs filling out, click through to the topic in question and edit it.

But more importantly, let’s create some new saved views:

1. Start with a type you’re interested in
2. Add and remove columns to show the information you want
3. Filter to limit the scope to something manageable
4. “Save view as…” some meaningful name. (If you can’t find this, you might need to click on the “Filter” button.)
5. Tell us about the view you created

Some of the best of these will become future data mobs.

Let’s add some different kinds of roads. Either add the streets near where you live or work, or choose a list of highways in other countries from Wikipedia and import them as roads in Freebase.

Don’t forget to go fill out properties for the streets you add, such as the road orientation, length, and cities that the road passes through.