freebase overview

FreebaseKirrily Robert

http://freebase.com/

“an open, shared database...”

“...of the world’s information”

What? How much?

Total 4.1m

People 800k

Places 692k

Music album 507k

Companies 55k

Films 40k

Olympic athletes 32k

800,000 people

Almost 700,000 locations

500,000 musical albums

55,000 companies

40,000 films

32,000 Olympic athletes

376 types of cheese

234 tall ships

716 chefs

138 public transit systems

800 digital cameras

Topic view: TV show

Topic view: Airport

Filter/table view: cameras

Filtering: Living African-American authors

Whence?

• Wikipedia

• MusicBrainz

• SEC (US companies)

• GNIS (geodata)

• ... etc

Wikipedia

• 2.6m topics

• Doubling roughly every 18 months

• Imported regularly to Freebase

Wikipedia

Wikipedia: Unstructured articles

Becomes... structured data in Freebase

Structured data from Wikipedia

• Wikipedia categories

• Wikipedia templates/infoboxes

Wikipedia category becomesFreebase type /baseball/baseball_team

/architecture/skyscraper /location/country

Wikipedia infoboxes help populate...

• 2.6m topics/articles(exclude history, talk, lists, etc.)

• 7.1m category references(within 280k categories)

• 42m template values(found within 10k templates and 56k template keys)

• AKA “WEX”

• Used internally by Freebase

• Partially-structured, parseable

• http://download.freebase.com/

Wikipedia Extract

MusicBrainz

• Includes: albums, artists, releases

• Excludes: tracks, spoken word

• Fortnightly updates

Other data sources(examples)

• Oxford Bottled Beer Database

• Olympic games data

• Cheese

• Home Theatre

In order of preference

• Public Domain

• “Sure, go ahead”

• CC-BY

• Everything else

Community contributions

Bases(aka user domains)

• Data communities

• Specific field of interest

• Wiki alternative

Apps

• Built using our API

• Various languages (Javascript, PHP, Python, Java...)

Wine browser

Archiportal

Sketchiest restaurants in San Francisco

Another influence viewer

Shot or not?(a game)

Dipity Timelines(embeddable in Facebook, Myspace, etc)

Translation based in localised keys in Freebase

Thinkbase - general purpose Freebase graph browser

Powerset search engine

Freebase ParallaxStep 1: TV shows

Step 2: Limit to UK shows

Step 3: connect to actors in those shows

Step 4: Map by place of birth

Alternate: timeline of birthdates

The Freebase APIin three parts

• Query language - MQL

• RESTful web service

• Development platform

MQL

• JSON based query language

• Query by example

[{ "type" : "/people/person" "gender" : "Female", "nationality" : "Australia", "id" : null, "name" : null,}]

MQL query

[ { "gender" : "Female", "id" : "/en/gina_rinehart", "name" : "Gina Rinehart", "nationality" : "Australia", "type" : "/people/person" }, { "gender" : "Female", "id" : "/en/dannii_minogue", "name" : "Dannii Minogue", "nationality" : "Australia", "type" : "/people/person" }, .....]

MQL response

API

• Simple RESTful API

• Read/write “facts” - mqlread/mqlwrite

• Search

• Access blob store

mqlread

http://freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query={...}

mqlread

search

http://freebase.com/api/service/search?query=...

(other params also available)

search

freebase-suggest

• JQuery plugin

• On Google Code

blurbs

http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/blurb/guid/blah

blurbs

image thumbnails

http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/image_thumb/guid/blah?maxwidth=100&maxheight=100

image thumbnails

Acre

• Hosted app development environment

• Server-side javascript

• Templating engine: Mjt

• Social software development

Example: FMDB

• Replicates the main parts of IMDB (movies, actors, roles)

• Originally written in Mjt (24kb HTML/JavaSript)

• Now ported to Acre

Edit mode - MQL query

Preview mode - MQL results

Edit mode - Movie page

Templating language example

Freebase community

• Discussion forums

• Mailing lists

• developer

• data-modeling

• Experts programme

blog.freebase.com

kirrily@metaweb.com

Twitter: fbase