Freebase: crack for information nerds
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I have discovered something more crack-like than Wikipedia.
Freebase is a collection of user-contributed and -edited data about everything. Like Wikipedia, you can put just about anything in there. Unlike Wikipedia, you don’t just provide text, but can provide structured data. For instance, for a topic of type “person”, there are fields for date of birth and so forth. This structured data then permits all kinds of navigation, analysis, and further use beyond what an unstructured essay can provide.
So what? Well, check this out.
Freebase was originally seeded with just about everything from Wikipedia, as “topics”. A “topic” is about the most vague thing you can have on Freebase: just a description and maybe some photos. So usually topics are categorised into “types”. Now, you know me. I created some types…
And then I can go and put some of those vague “topics” from Wikipedia into types. So now we have a list of Tall Ships…
Click on one of them and we can see the details:
Each of those fields can be edited. Some (like “does it sail?”) are ones that I defined for the type “Tall ship”, while others (like “keel laid”) are inherited from the class “Ship”. When you specify a field, you can say what type of thing should go in there. Anything from boolean to year to specifying that whatever’s entered should be something in the class “Person”, or “Location”, or “Tall ship rig”.
Here are some of the properties I’ve defined on “Tall ship”:
So, endless entertainment fiddling with the data, which as you can imagine had me tossing and turning last night going “ooh, and…!” when I should’ve been sleeping.
Of course, with this much semantic data, there are programming APIs available to extract it and use it for stuff. I haven’t got into much of it yet, but will post about it when I do.
Freebase is currently in closed alpha. If you go to freebase.com you can sign up to try it out.
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