Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community—free for anyone to query, contribute to, built applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.
Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC, it contains structured information on many popular topics, like movies, music, people and locations—all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users, who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food 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.
In addition to reconciling many facets of one topic, the underlying structure of Freebase lets you run complex queries—that is, ask questions of the data—that are difficult or impossible to run in conventional databases. For example, if you ask Freebase for Jennifer Connelly films with actors who have appeared in a Steven Spielberg movie, you’ll get a tidy list of eight movies. The extra-cool part is that if you’re a developer, or just mildly technical, Freebase offers tools that make it easy to query and integrate the data into web apps, blogs, wikis, user pages or anything else that would benefit from an injection of structured information.
Finally, while information in Freebase appears to be structured much like a conventional database, it’s actually built on a system that allows any user to contribute to the schemas—or frameworks—that hold the data. This wiki-like approach to structuring information lets many people organize the database without formal, centralized planning. And it lets subject experts who don’t have database expertise find one another, and then build and maintain the data in their domain of interest.
social bookmarking sites and tools, search engines
