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Freebasing at Code4LibFebruary 25, 2009 This is the end of the second day at the 2009 Code4Lib Conference in Providence, RI, and so far there have been a few recurring themes/technologies/techniques. Besides the usual Solr love-fest, there were others that stood out for me. One was Freebase.Freebase.com pitches itself as "A social database about things you know and love". It is incredibly easy to sign up and start adding structured information into a database that has no resemblance to the databases your mother used to know. And that's a good thing. Freebase.com kind of strikes me like a Wikipedia that doesn't need the DBpedia.org effort to extract structured data from it. Information in Freebase is structured from the get-go. I signed on quite some time ago (July 12, 2007 the site informs me), and I've apparently made 89 factual contributions. Who knew I could be so helpful? There are a couple aspects of this site worth mentioning. One is that you can create an online custom view of informnation in the site. One good example of this is the Louvre site on Freebase. This sub-site highlights all kinds of useful information about this museum, although it is worth pointing out that it is has direct affiliation with the museum and it is only interested parties (of whatever provenance) who are contributing to it. The other aspect, highlighted at Code4Lib, is the fact that you can interact with the site via an API. In particular, Sean Hannan of Johns Hopkins University gave a presentation on it. There is MQL, Acre, Mjt, and who knows what that you can use to query Freebase, get back structured data and do interesting things with it. Yes, it is YET ANOTHER DATA SOURCE, but who knows, it just may prove to be useful. Will I make a prediction about it's utility and longevity? No. But is it worth considering? Definitely. Posted by Roy Tennant on February 25, 2009 | Comments (3)
March 2, 2009
In response to: Freebasing at Code4Lib Skud commented: Hi Roy, and thanks for posting about Freebase! I agree the Louvre base is very appealling, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody involved with it has any official connection to the museum. Perhaps the link to the Louvre's official website led you to think that?
March 3, 2009
In response to: Freebasing at Code4Lib Ed Summers commented: I walked away from code4lib being much more interested to explore Freebase as well. One correction though, like DBpedia, Freebase is largely derived from Wikipedia data. They go through the same effort. The difference between Freebase and DBpedia is that Freebase allows users to edit/augment that data. Which is a huge value add.
March 3, 2009
In response to: Freebasing at Code4Lib Roy Tennant commented: Skud: Ack! I think I forgot the word "no" in my sentence, so it should read "This sub-site highlights all kinds of useful information about this museum, although it is worth pointing out that it is has NO direct affiliation with the museum and it is only interested parties (of whatever provenance) who are contributing to it." Thanks for pointing out that egregious error.
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