Freebase beginner: getting an athlete's sport - freebase

Question

I'm trying to use Freebase to find out what team a professional athlete belongs to.
So I'm trying to do something like this
[{
"id": null,
"name": "Kobe Bryant",
"type": "/sports/pro_athlete",
"sports_played": []
}]​
query editor
and then extract the property "sport_played" to find out what sport the player belongs to. My plan is to then do a more specific query for "basketball_player" or so until I finde the team name. (Is a simpler way to do this?)
However, I already fail at the first step, because in the results, while the properties sport_played and sport_played_professionally contain a single entry, that entry is null:
{
"code": "/api/status/ok",
"result": [{
"id": "/en/kobe_bryant",
"name": "Kobe Bryant",
"sports_played": [
null
],
"type": "/sports/pro_athlete"
}],
"status": "200 OK",
"transaction_id": "cache;cache03.p01.sjc1:8101;2012-06-13T13:30:20Z;0053"
}
I'm confused: I know from browsing the database that there should be a sport value for this player. And the result clearly shows that there is a single value in the "sports_played" list in the result.
But why is it null? Shouldn't is rather be a reference to a Basketball object?

Answer 1

Your query is asking for a list of sports_played but since you only used square braces it will only return a list of the names of all the matching topics.
If you add curly braces to the query you'll see that sports_played actually returns one topic with name = null (which is what your previous query was showing)
[{
"id": null,
"name": "Kobe Bryant",
"type": "/sports/pro_athlete",
"sports_played": [{}]
}]
This is because the expected value of sports_played is a CVT called Sports played which links athletes to sports for specific periods of time. This is so that we can keep track of athletes that have played multiple sports and know which one is the most current.
If you want to see the values inside the CVT object, you'll need to drill down further like this:
[{
"id": null,
"name": "Kobe Bryant",
"type": "/sports/pro_athlete",
"sports_played": [{
"type": "/sports/pro_sports_played",
"sport": {
"id": null,
"name": null
},
"career_start": null,
"career_end": null
}]
}]
Try it in the Query Editor

Answer 2

The sports_played property isn't really what you want here since it's not necessarily correlated with the properties which contain the team information.
Instead you want to use something along the lines of:
{
"id": null,
"name": "Kobe Bryant",
"/basketball/basketball_player/team" : [{"team":null}],
}]
}
if you wanted to get all the teams for all the Kobe Bryants you could use something like:
[{
"id": null,
"name": "Kobe Bryant",
"/soccer/football_player/current_team" : [{"team":null,"optional":true}],
"/basketball/basketball_player/team" : [{"team":null,"optional":true}],
"/american_football/football_player/current_team" :[{"team":null,"optional":true}]
}]
}]​
Unfortunately you'll need to go through the schema by hand and pull out the properties of interest by hand since they're not reliably regular enough to query automatically, but there really aren't that many sports to consider, so it shouldn't take very long to assemble your list.