http://freebase.com

Open writable semantic database with information on millions of topics. Contains models & links. Models are RFD schemas & links are Freebase also adds a query system that allows developers to treat topic as simple objects.A type a collection of properties that may be applied (hang off) to a topic

Freebase contains data harvested from:

Wikipedia

Chemoz

NNDB

MusicBrainz

SEC Filings

OpenLibrary

TV Rage

Individually contributed data from its users

The data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Freebase Blog on Data Loads: http://blog.freebase.com/category/data/data-loads/Freebase Attribution Policy: http://www.freebase.com/policies/index/

Each freebase topic is unique it represents one and only thing. Every fb topic has been smushed (reconciled)

Source: http://blog.freebase.com/2009/08/12/freebase-now-has-8-4-million-topics/

8.4 million topics

Freebase operates as a identity dbID for topic provides key value for TopicActs as a hub or switchboard for other RDF data stores musicbrainz, wikipediaCooperates as 'see also' with dbpedia

http://www.freebase.com/view/en/arnold_schwarzenegger

For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger would appear in a movie database as an actor, a political database as a governor, and a bodybuilder database as a Mr. Universe. In Freebase there is one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger that contains information about all three facets of his public life. The unified topic acts as an information hub, making it easy to find and contribute information about him regardless of what kind of information it is.

Collection View: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/investment_banking/-/business/industry/companies

Aggregates topics into collections. Notice you can download into various formats or view and edit the schema.

Example Query for Directors of $10M+ companies who have starred in movies.

Source: http://blog.freebase.com/2008/04/03/company-data-from-the-sec/

Freebase added a bunch of SEC company data. This is an example of a query that looks for directors who on companies of a market cap of 10 million and also stared in a movie. A whimsical example but and example of how you can combine data in interesting and novel ways.

Freebase User Dashboard

The freebase dashboard once logged in. It will show:

1. who you are following,2. the bases u administer, 3. news about activities on your bases

On freebase you can edit existing or add new types and properties. Freebase's auto-complete suggestion will pop up existing types before you add a new one. It won't let you add an existing type.

Creating a Base: A Collection of Topics

1. Views. Views are the focal point of bases. They are the individual items that members of a base spend time creating, improving, and showing off to others. At a basic level, a view is just a named collection of topics, like TV Actors, 80s Food and Drinks, or Baseball players born in San Francisco. Views can be displayed as lists or galleries, and can be sorted by any property field in the included topics. Views are easy to create. Check out the Using the Filter View help topic to learn how. 2. News. This is a feed of the latest activity within the base. 3. Members. These are the people who have joined the base. 4. Schema. The schema determines which information fields show up on each of the topic pages in the base. 5. Weblinks. These are links to other bases and third-party websites that the members of a base think are useful and relevant. 6. Help. Each base has its own help section.

Adding Topics and Views

Developer Documentation and Tools

Freebase provides a query editor for MQL, the Freebase query language

MQL uses json style queringquerying and returns. The query builder is a way to test queries b/f using in code, etc.

App editing and hosting is provided by Freebase

Acre is an application hosting platform designed to minimize the effort required by the Freebase community to build web applications that make use of the data contained by Freebase and create mashups with web services provided by others.

display the latest news about the 3 companies with the highest market cap in any given industry.

Result of App View

Bing enhanced search results pulls in Freebase content

Example of how Bing serves up a Freebase collection

When bing searches things that have collections associated in freebase it will populate search with images, etc. if appropriate eg. Picasso's artwork

Zemanta Uses Freebase in Its Keyword Tool Tips

http://www.zemanta.com/

Zemanta Balloons When you add Balloons to your blog post or article, Zemanta will scan the text, looking for important keywords that correspond to topics in Freebase. When it finds them, it will add a link and a small icon that users can click on to preview the content, and to view more information about that topic from Freebase.

Under the hood, Zemanta is tagging pages with Freebase topic IDs (e.g., Afghanistan) instead of free text (e.g., Afghanistan). By doing that, they can use the Freebase API to dynamically display relevant facts and figures from Freebase. You could imagine how this same notion could be extended in all sorts of ways, as developers build new and interesting widgets capable of understanding the machine-readable Freebase tags.

Tippify, a Recommendation & Social Site, Uses Freebase as Its Catalog

http://www.tippify.com/

TippifyTippify uses Freebase data to help you recommend books, movies and music to your friends and keep track of the latest things that they are into. It has a lot of social components that developers can reuse in their own Freebase apps - like sending updates to Twitter and inviting friends via email and Facebook.