Re: Modeling fictional characters in movies and TV

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@greggkellogg.net>wrote:

> On Jan 8, 2013, at 5:43 PM, Jason Douglas <jasondouglas@google.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@greggkellogg.net>
> wrote:
> > TL:DR: propose adding schema:Character, schema:Location, and
> schema:FictionalLocation classes, along with a schema:character property.
> >
> > In the work I'm doing with Wikia, we're using extensions to schema.orgto add structure to Wiki content. Wikia hosts hundreds of thousands of
> wiki's, mostly related to special-interest subjects. Important classes of
> these include sites about Movies, TV Shows/Series and Video Games.
> >
> > Cool!!
> >
> >
> > The schema.org vocabulary is pretty useful in doing this but lacks some
> important properties and types:
> >
> > Character class: a Character is a subclass of Person, which is intended
> to represent some fictional character. This could include fictional human
> characters, such as Sam Spade, as well as non-human characters, such as
> "The Cat in the Hat". As such, it could also be considered to be a union of
> schema:CreativeWork and schema:Person. Alternatively, it may simply be a
> sub-class of Creative Work which simply has some properties in common with
> Person (birthDate, colleague, gender, ...). Note that books can also have
> characters.
> >
> > Character property: An important characteristic of things such as
> movies, and TV shows is the characters that are in them. For instance,
> TVEpisode has actor, director, producer and so forth, but no way to
> indicate the characters that are in the show. Here is where having
> Character class comes in handy, so that you might have the following:
> >
> > <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Where_No_Man_Has_Gone_Before_(episode)>
> >   a schema:TVEpisode;
> >   schema:name "Where No Man Has Gone Before"@en;
> >   schema:partOfTVSeries <
> http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series>;
> >   schema:character <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_T._Kirk>;
> >   schema:actor <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/William_Shatner> .
> >
> > One downside of this is that when you have multiple characters you lose
> the ability to correlate the actor to the character.
>
> In the example below, I set schema:actor on the character


ah, missed that.


> , but it's obviously loosing some temporal information. More complex
> modeling can be more accurate, but within the context of a single graph
> (e.g., for a specific episode), we can probably simplify it that there is a
> signal actor for each character, or at least a set of actors.


> > An alternative, that Freebase uses, is to create a class for
> Performance, that has the properties of character (expects Character has
> you defined) and actor (which works the same as actor on today).
>
> This is sort of like an Event, which acts to join various elements
> together (characters and actors in this case), perhaps along with elements
> such as scenes and locations. I like the idea of having a Performance
> class, but there may be times when simpler modeling works.
>
> > Connecting that to TVEpisode could be done with either a new
> "performance" property or by making actor accept Person or Performance.
> >
> >
> > <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_T._Kirk> a schema:Character
> >   schema:name "James T. Kirk";
> >   schema:birthDate "2233-03-22"^^xsd:date;
> >   schema:deathDate "2371"^^xsd:gYear;
> >   schema:actor <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/William_Shatner> .
> >
> > Another class of properties generally useful for works of media classes
> is Location. A schema:Location class could be a sub-class of schema:Place,
> intended to describe locations that might not be real, or not at least not
> having geographic coordinates you can get to using Goole Maps. A location
> could also be a Fictional Location, such as Middle Earth.
> >
> > Lastly, many wiki's concern themselves with Video Games, which have
> quite deep structure. Logically, a Video Game is probably a sub-class of
> schema:SoftwareApplication. Of course, there are many other things that
> could be modeled on video games, such as levels, objectives and weapons,
> but having a concrete class for describing them would be quite useful.
> >
> > Since the Wikia communities are the real domain experts here do you
> think there's any chance they could enumerate these in a public schema.orgextension proposal?
>
> This post was an attempt to get that started, and the most obvious missing
> pieces are for Character and Location, along with the character
> relationship.
>

Agreed, those are needed incremental additions.


>
> Video Games is a deeper subject, and we can share the work we're doing,
> but it will be a more substantive proposal. I'd really like to use it to
> get a conversation with other people who have worked on modeling games. Our
> current focus has been on linear first-person shooter style games, but much
> of the work carries over to open-world/parallel mission environments too.
> We'll come back with more on this in the future.
>

Yeah, Video Games is where I was hoping for a more "substantive proposal"
as you say.  Sounds good.


> Gregg
>
> > -jason
> >
> >
> > Gregg Kellogg
> > gregg@greggkellogg.net
> >
> >
> >
>
>