Uh, lazyweb...?

Update: Thanks, universally helpful lazyweb!

I know it was only a month ago that you were invoked here last. But... Freebase. It's killing me (I was inspried to finally build something using it by Pierre, whose examples I have sadly failed to adapt :( ).

What MQL can I use to get *all* of the information about *all* people with profession of 'author'?

I have

{
  "query" : [
  {
    "*" : [
       {}
    ],   
    "guid" : null,
    "limit" : 5,
    "name" : null,
    "profession" : "author",
    "type" : "/people/person"
  }
  ]
}

(thanks to Pierre for pointing out a syntax error here originally, oops)

Which should list all of the properties for 5 authors, right? But I only see properties from the /people/person schema.

How do I get all the author properties too?

I ended up using the MQL in Pierre's second comment to get a list of GUIDs for all authors (having changed the limit to 10k) then iterated over them getting all of the properties from /people/person (D.O.B, nationality...), /book/author (list of books) and /common/type (image, article) in three different calls (oy). It works, though - again, as Pierre suggests. ;)

There is a way to get everything in one MQL call, though, as Alf says:

{
  "query" : [
    {
      "*" : null,
      "/book/author/books" : [
        {
          "*" : null
        }
      ],
      "/common/topic/article" : [
        {
          "*" : null
        }
      ],
      "/common/topic/image" : [
        {
          "*" : null
        }
      ],
      "limit" : 5,
      "profession" : "author",
      "type" : "/people/person"
    }
  ]
}

The disadvantage to this is that it's a lot of data to get in one go (considering there are thousands of authors each with lots of books)... I guess that's where paging through the results would come in (as Brendan correctly predicts).


And finally, for future reference.... skud points out that the mailing list is here.