Types in Freebase typically mean that something plays a role. For instance, superman is a :film.film_subject because he the subject of a film. He is an :amusement_parks.ride_theme because amusement parks have been made about him. There's nothing contradictory about this, at least to first order, because these types don't fit into a hierarchy.

1. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
The Supermen
FictionalCharactersinDBpedia,FreebaseandotherGenericDatabases
Paul Houle
– Creatorofdatabaseanimalsandbayesianbrains
June 27, 2014

2. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
This is based on a response to a person who was looking at a
record for the D.C. comics character named Superman in
:BaseKB, which is derived from Freebase

3. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
What I see in Freebase right now (June 2014)
https://www.freebase.com/m/070vn#/award/ranked_item
doesn't contain anything that strikes me as wrong, but there is a
split discussion attached to it and it's a little fishy that the topic
was created on June 4 2013. If I look at it with the gold copy of
:BaseKB that dated March 2014,
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00KDO5IFA
and do this query with the sql command
SQL> sparql select ?type {
<http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/m.070vn> a ?type .};
type
LONG VARCHAR
___________________________________________________________
____________________
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/theater.theater_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/user.geektastique.superheroes.topi
c
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/base.zxspectrum.topic
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/common.topic
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/award.ranked_item
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/base.ontologies.ontology_instance
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/base.tagit.concept
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/book.book_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/comic_books.comic_book_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/fictional_universe.fictional_chara
cter
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/film.film_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/film.film_subject
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/tv.tv_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/base.fictionaluniverse.topic
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/cvg.game_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/user.duck1123.default_domain.prima
ry_identity
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/user.duck1123.default_domain.adopt
ed_character
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/amusement_parks.ride_theme
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/base.fictionaluniverse.cloned_char
acter
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/user.geektastique.superheroes.supe
rhero
http://rdf.basekb.com/ns/user.jschell.default_domain.alter_
ego
and I don't see anything that's obviously wrong there.

4. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
Types without Hierarchy

5. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
Types in Freebase typically mean that something plays a role. For
instance, superman is a :film.film_subject because he the subject
of a film. He is an :amusement_parks.ride_theme because
amusement parks have been made about him. There's nothing
contradictory about this, at least to first order, because these types
don't fit into a hierarchy.
This is similar to what people call this a 'duck type' in some
programming languages, and this is the way an RDFS reasoner
thinks. If we define
:film.film.subjects a rdfs:Property .
:film.film.subjects rdfs:domain :film.film .
:film.film.subjects rdfs:range :film.film_subject .
and tell the reasoner that
:m.01_mdl :film.film.subjects :m.070vn .
it infers that
:m.01_mdl a :film.film .
:m.070vn a :film.film_subject.
It's liberating to not have types in a strict hierarchy. You'll hear
people say
:Person rdfs:subClassOf :Animal .
but lawyers will tell you that
:Corporation a :Person .

6. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
this is a contradiction, of course. The problem isn't any of the
statements, it's the fact that we're using :Person to mean two
different things. That is, a member of the species homo sapiens vs
an entity that can be a party to a contract.
The Foaf vocabulary partially resolves this problem by creating the
foaf:Agent concept such that
foaf:Person rdfs:subClassOf foaf:Agent .
foaf:Organization rdfs:subClassOf foaf:Agent .
if we know
m.070vn a foaf:Person .
the system infers
m.070vn a foaf:Agent .
By the language of the standard, ["Something is a Person if it is a
person. We don't nitpic about whether they're alive, dead, real, or
imaginary."(http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Person) Though
he's not a member of Homo Sapiens , he looks like a person, talks
like a person and flies faster than a speeding plane so I guess he's a
person.
Practically, you could map the Freebase :people.person to
foaf:Person and map :business.employer to foaf:Organization and
feel comfortable. How you map things from there is more
subjective. If you don't want your system to call Jack Bauer for
help, you don't have to map fictional characters to foaf:Person . It's
a choice you make based on what you want your system to think.
Splitting hairs

7. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
In databases such as DBpedia, Freebase and Wikidata, concepts
like
"Superman" get overloaded. The trouble is that they take multiple
forms; for instance Superman the character might have started in a
comic book, but he has been in movies and TV shows and been the
subject of pinball games, amusement park rides, video games, etc.
So when you say there are multiple topics with the same id, you are
right. Some people split topics finer than others do.
Worse than that, since Superman has been around a long time there
have been many different versions of him in the comic books.
After
the 1980's "Crisis of infinite worlds", Superman is officially the
"last Kryptonian", the only survivor of Krypton's explosion. Before
then there was Krypto, General Zod, and Supergirl but they all got
wiped out, or sorta-kinda wiped out in the case of

8. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_prime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergirl_(Matrix)
Marvel is almost as bad, to the point where it is hard to make
statements about a subject like "Iron Man"; for instance, the
original Iron Man kept his identity secret from almost everybody,
including Pepper Potts, He's completely open about it in the recent
movies and comics. The Hulk has usually been named "Bruce
Banner"
except on the 1970s TV show where he was named "David
Banners".
Unless you split "Iron Man" and "The Hulk" into separate
characters,
you can't make statements about the most basic facts about them.
Will the real Star Trek Stand up?
You run into similar problems with "Star Trek", "Sailor Moon",

9. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
"Halo" and other media franchises.
If you need a finer grained description of a domain like this, you
could try to build it into Freebase or DBpedia through the
community
process or you can create your own database. This starts with
writing
a better schema, but there's the challenge that people might have a
hard time populating that schema or using it. I'd imagine a crack
ontologist who's obsessed with comic books would probably
define 50 or
100 "Supermen" to model the illustrious history of what most
people
think of the one and only "Superman"
We're only human
There's a tension, however, between databases that are precise

10. Paul Houle - The Supermen
http://blog.databaseanimals.com/the-supermen[7/9/2014 3:37:19 PM]
versus databases that can be maintained by a community. What's in
Wikipedia, for instance, is controlled by a battle between
inclusionists and exclusionists over what is "notable" enough to be
in Wikipedia. Star Trek is notable enough that each episode has its
own page, yet there are no individual pages for the 13,088 episodes
of General Hospital. Although Wikis dedicated to fictional words
are encouraged on Wikia, detailed coverage of fictional worlds
will always get pushback from deletionists in Wikipedia.
We can have simple databases that everyone can contribute too, or
more complex databases that require you to be an ontologist and a
comic fan at the same time. It would be nice to see something
though that's to Wikia what Freebase and DBpedia are to
Wikipedia.
Paul Houle
Creator of database animals and bayesian brains
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© 2014 Paul Houle