Linking entities

Since Discogs is all about linking information, I thought it would make sense to be able to link "any" entity to "any" other entity in a structured way.

Something like this:

<entity_1> <relationship> <entity_2> [<from_date> <to_date>]

examples:

"Justin Broadrick" -> "Member Of" -> "Napalm Death" -> "From: Jan 1986" -> "To: Aug 1986"
"Justin Broadrick" -> "Owner Of" -> "Avalanche"
"Peter Brötzmann" -> "Father Of" -> "Caspar Brötzmann" -> "From: 1963" -> "To: Current Date"
...

Also, the relationship should have a "mirrored value":
- "Member Of" would be mirrored to "Has Member"
- "Owner Of" would be mirrored to "Owned By"
- "Father Of" would be mirrored to "Child Of",
...

Parts of the above relationships are currently possible (e.g. parent label), but most of it is only possible to write it in the artist/label profile in an unstructured way.

What do you think about it?

jmoortga
What do you think about it?

Very very very cool
+1000
thanks

anyone else?

Neat idea. I'd also include Married To and Was Married To.

+1

Except maybe from-to dates on fatherhood...

Dates would be optional.
Also, I only gave some examples of what relations might be - the most important is that you should be able to link entities in a structured way rather than "free text".

+ another 1000

Hm, MusicBrainz does exactly this, no? Not a bad idea to copy, though.

^ I had no idea - but thanks for pointing that out.

Anyway, instead of linking stuff as "free text" via a profile or the notes-field, I believe it makes more sense to do that in a structured way.

AFAIK, there's 3 main entities in the underlying datamodel that are involved: artists, labels and releases.
So basically all it takes is
- a many-to-many relationship between all of them
- a many-to-many recursive relationship (pigs ear) on any of them

Linking a release to another release is already possible via the master release, but it also could come in handy when linking a compilation with the original album for example, relationship = "compiled on" mirrored to "compiles" (or something similar).

Linking a label to another label is already possible via the parent-label, but it also could come in handy when linking a label with a "studio" for example (a "studio" is stored as an instance of a label), relationship = "has studio" mirrored to "studio of" (or something similar).

Anyway, I think there's a whole lot of possible relationships that we could use here in order to link all these entities.

jmoortga
Linking a label to another label is already possible via the parent-label

But only one parent. Some labels change parent labels over the years.

which is where the "from-date" - "to-date" could come in handy.