Freebase System
A Freebase System is a semantic system composed of the Freebase knowledge base and an online database API.
- AKA: Freebase Service.
- Context:
- It will be will be wound down as a standalone project in mid-2015.
- It ranks candidate entities in its keyword search API.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Entity, OmegaWiki, Probase Knowledge Base, Semantic Web, Wikipedia, NNDB.
References
2014
- Dec, 2014 https://plus.google.com/109936836907132434202/posts/bu3z2wVqcQc
- When we publicly launched Freebase back in 2007, we thought of it as a "Wikipedia for structured data." So it shouldn't be surprising that we've been closely watching the Wikimedia Foundation's project Wikidata[1] since it launched about two years ago. We believe strongly in a robust community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge about the world, but we now think we can serve that goal best by supporting Wikidata -- they’re growing fast, have an active community, and are better-suited to lead an open collaborative knowledge base.
So we've decided to help transfer the data in Freebase to Wikidata, and in mid-2015 we’ll wind down the Freebase service as a standalone project.
- When we publicly launched Freebase back in 2007, we thought of it as a "Wikipedia for structured data." So it shouldn't be surprising that we've been closely watching the Wikimedia Foundation's project Wikidata[1] since it launched about two years ago. We believe strongly in a robust community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge about the world, but we now think we can serve that goal best by supporting Wikidata -- they’re growing fast, have an active community, and are better-suited to lead an open collaborative knowledge base.
- (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/freebase#Overview Retrieved:2014-9-14.
- On March 3, 2007, Metaweb publicly announced Freebase, described by the company as "an open shared database of the world's knowledge", and "a massive, collaboratively edited database of cross-linked data." Often understood as database model using Wikipedia-turned-database or entity-relationship model, Freebase provides an interface that allows non-programmers to fill in structured data, or metadata, of general information, and to categorize or connect data items in meaningful, semantic ways.
Described by Tim O'Reilly upon their launch, "Freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web."
Freebase contains data harvested from sources such as Wikipedia, NNDB, FMD and MusicBrainz, as well as individually contributed data from its users. The structured data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, and a JSON-based HTTP API is provided to programmers for developing applications on any platform to utilize the Freebase data. The source code for the Metaweb application itself is proprietary.
Freebase runs on a database infrastructure created in-house by Metaweb that uses a graph model. This means that instead of using tables and keys to define data structures, Freebase defines its data structure as a set of nodes and a set of links that establish relationships between the nodes. Because its data structure is non-hierarchical, Freebase can model much more complex relationships between individual elements than a conventional database, and is open for users to enter new objects and relationships into the underlying graph. Queries to the database are made in Metaweb Query Language (MQL) and served by a triplestore called graphd.
- On March 3, 2007, Metaweb publicly announced Freebase, described by the company as "an open shared database of the world's knowledge", and "a massive, collaboratively edited database of cross-linked data." Often understood as database model using Wikipedia-turned-database or entity-relationship model, Freebase provides an interface that allows non-programmers to fill in structured data, or metadata, of general information, and to categorize or connect data items in meaningful, semantic ways.
2011
- (March 2011) ⇒ http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/What_is_Freebase%3F
- Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data of almost 20 million entities.
- An entity is a single person, place, or thing. Freebase connects entities together as a graph.
- Ways to use Freebase:
- Use Freebase's Ids to uniquely identify entities anywhere on the web
- Query Freebase's data using MQL
- Build applications using our API or Acre, our hosted development platform
- Freebase is also a community of thousands of data-lovers, working together to improve Freebase's data. Learn how to contribute, join our mailing list, or find out more on our community page. ...
- Anyone can contribute data to Freebase, and you can also build your own schema in a Base if Freebase does not yet have schema for a subject you're interested in.
- Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data of almost 20 million entities.