Freebase: A freely usable database of knowledge
I haven’t blogged in a while and thought I would write about Freebase. I just recently received an invitation to try out their alpha version and my first impressions are quite positive. According to the Freebase website:
Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.
Freebase.com allows anyone to contribute, structure, search, copy and use data, through either the Freebase.com web site or through application program interfaces (APIs). Freebase makes it easy put data in and pull data out for any commercial or non-commercial purpose.
At first glance it looks like they may be appearing to clone wikipedia but according to their website they are different.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with information arranged in the form of articles. Freebase is more of an almanac, organized like a database, and readable by people or software. Wikipedia and Freebase both appeal to people who love to use and organize information. In fact, many of the founding contributors to Freebase are also active in the Wikipedia community. Whenever Freebase and Wikipedia cover the same topic, Freebase will link to the Wikipedia article to make it easy for users to access the best of both sites.
From my brief use of the service and limited understanding I think the most exciting aspect about freebase is that it is free and open for anyone to use. The other thing I find exciting is its ability to put structure around data so that programmers can use the meta-data to access the information in the database through an application programmer interface (API) in new and innovative ways. Structure is supposed to be given to information in the Freebase database through the concepts of topics and properties, types and domains. It will be interesting to see how this database evolves over time and how the information is categorized. If you have the time it’s definitely a project worth checking out and contributing to.
