Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Freebase, notability, and minority data

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! You know I went to work for Freebase, right? Well, this is a personal post about a work-related topic. Consider that a disclaimer; these are my views, not official company ones, though I trust and believe [...]

What I’ve been up to lately

It’s been ages since I posted, and that’s kind of bad. I just wanted to draw your attention to some work-related stuff that’s pretty cool.

Freebase, where I work, have just released full data dumps. This is important stuff, people! Freebase has long been licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY, specifically) but although [...]

Settling in

Well, I’m here in San Francisco and starting to settle in nicely. Lots of social stuff going on, fun work that doesn’t feel like work, and I found a place to live really quickly and easily.

This photo’s by the lovely yarnivore who took it last weekend at a Rock Band extravaganza where we [...]

California, here I come

I seem to be constitutionally incapble of avoiding that subject line. Sigh. I apologise.

In any case, it’s official. I’m moving to California in less than two weeks’ time.

I put off mentioning it here in some sort of fit of superstition. I didn’t want to jinx it. But back in [...]

New Freebase blog

I decided to set up a separate blog for my Freebase blitherings. You can find it at freebasing.org. Points of interest so far:

Thoughts on the cultural associations of location data New tool: RSS feed of new types

Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed.

A quick tour of Freebase

I posted a while ago about my new crack habit, Freebase. Freebase is — to my mind — like Wikipedia mashed up with the LambdaMOO class hierarchy. The idea of creating classes and types for real world things — ships, people, breeds of sheep, bones in the human body — rather than [...]

Freebase: crack for information nerds

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 [...]