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How are indirect objects represented in Freebase?

I know google can give the answer to the question:

Who did obama give the medal of freedom to?

Washington (CNN) – President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the nation's highest civilian honor - to 16 people, from former President Bill Clinton and iconic talk show host Oprah Winfrey to the late astronaut Sally Ride, in ceremonies Wednesday.

In short what would be the triple stored or freebase query/mql/sparql for the question?

Obama gave the Medal of Freedom to President Bill Clinton.

Obama gave the Medal of Freedom to Oprah Winfrey.

etc.

or

Obama gave President Bill Clinton the Medal of Freedom.

Obama gave Oprah Winfrey the Medal of Freedom.

etc.

I'm trying to learn about Freebase and here are some other questions I have. But most importantly, how is an indirect object stored as a triple?

enter image description here

Where did Barack Obama marry Michelle?

Where did Barack Obama attend college?

Although the last two questions are similar in structure the first is harder to answer while the second is easy because triples do not appear to support prepositional or indirect objects, or am I mistaken?

It appears that a simple triple could answer the second set of questions only because married_at is single event and is a prepositional object but not an indirect object. But, the first set of questions is ambiguous because bought_for and built_at can have many objects. Possibly the predicates can include an entity as in bought_for_her or built_at_beach, but this seems awkward.

Again, how would the indirect object be handled?

John
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1 Answers1

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Out of curiosity, what resources did you consult before asking this question?

I'm not going to attempt to unravel your terminology, but I suspect you are interested in what Freebase calls "Compound Value Types" (CVTs). http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Compound_Value_Type

Neither of your examples subjects have a Presidential Medal of Freedom award recorded in Freebase, but if we look at one of Oprah's recent awards (because she's waaay more important than any U.S. President, past or present), https://www.freebase.com/m/0101h08c?links= you can see that an award ceremony has a whole bunch of links (aka triples) connecting together the award, the awardee, the date, etc.

Here's one of the more recently recorded Presidential Medal of Freedom awards in Freebase https://www.freebase.com/m/0pkzg6y?links= (to Jackie Robinson) which contains the outbound links.

If you follow the links, though, you'll see that not only is there not a single link connecting what you're interested in, but it's more than one hop removed. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is a awarded by the office of the President of the United States, which is held by a person at the time of the award and the awardee is another hope removed from the award ceremony.

Tom Morris
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  • Thank you for helping me to understand what CVT's are. Google was consulted as well as stackoverflow and some checking around on freebase. – John Nov 03 '14 at 23:17