Freebase, Wikipedia-like content as linked data
Update for 02008 04 26: I neglected to take note of the article I published in the February 02008 issue of Searcher magazine on Freebase.
Original post, 02008 08 22:
A posting on Peter Van Garderen’s Archivemat.ca alerted me to Freebase, described on the Freebase site (it appears to have gone live on the evening of 2007 08 22 Pacific Daylight Savings Time) as “a uniquely structured database that you can easily search, add to and edit; you can also use the data in it to power your own projects. It’s a data commons in the way that a public square is a land commons—available to anyone to use.
Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. It’s been seeded with a few million topics from open sources, including Wikipedia and Musicbrainz, and while the first topics have mostly been in media categories like movies, music, and television, the Freebase community has already added thousands more topics on subjects from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of ingredients.
In fact, part of what makes Freebase unique is that it spans domains—but requires that a particular topic exist only once in Freebase, even if it might normally be found in multiple databases. 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 only one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger, with all three facets of his public persona brought together. The unified topic acts as an information hub, making it easy to find and contribute information about him. …”
Here’s a highly compressed GIF format screenshot of the Freebase entry for Doom, a Japanese thrash metal band.
