Recently, I watched a one hour long video about Freebase, an open database of the world’s information, built by a global community and free for anyone to query, contribute to, and build applications on. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, GNIS, EDGAR etc., Freebase is curated by a passionate community of users and contains structured information on millions of topics such as people, places, music, film, food, science, historical events, and more.
Freebase is designed to store the amorphous kind of data that you find in everyday life. To store data about the prolific Bob Dylan --who composed songs, sang and performed, wrote books, acted in movies-- which relational table should we use? The "song composer" table, or the "singer" table, or the "book author" table, or the "film actor" table? The answer is that we need to store data about that same person in all those different tables. This complexity is not limited to prolific people; a building could start out as a church, be turned into a hospital during a war, and later become a tourist destination. The apple is a fruit, but also an ingredient in numerous recipes, the logo of a company, and a literary device in the story of Snow White.
What's more? Those million topics are very intricately connected. A certain politician might have run a campaign funded by a pharmaceutical company, whose board consists of some people who used to study at some particular Ivy League schools. Topics in different domains (politics, business, education, etc.) are linked together, spanning across virtually any combination of tables. Real life is intricately interconnected, and so is Freebase data.
Freebase is not only a web site that people can use directly with their browsers, but it's also a collection of web services that your own web applications can use to achieve things that wouldn't be possible without additional data or a hosting platform where you can develop and run securely your web applications directly in Freebase's own server infrastructure.
Quick Links:
0 comments:
Post a Comment