Freebase is a way to use the Semantic Web. Basic Concepts and API Functions. Freebase data and the source code both are available for free usage. To a new user, the Freebase might appear difficult to understand simply for the reason – it is kind of software for hybrid data harvesting about ‘things’. ‘Things’ is described in schema.org – a human also falls among things – is not really we ?
What Freebase Basically Does ?
Freebase is a website that is located at freebase.com and has a software which is also named Freebase. One can download and install Freebase on own server for more specific usage :
1 | http://code.google.com/p/freebase-python/downloads/list |
When we use the word Freebase, usually the website is meant. This is reverse of WordPress – we usually mean the software. Freebase contains data collected from sources such as Wikipedia, ChefMoz, NNDB, MusicBrainz and data provided by individual users. Structured data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License and the API is based on JSON.
The reference of API can be found on Google’s Product Website :
1 | https://developers.google.com/freebase/guide/basic_concepts |
Freebase was developed by Metaweb and has been working in public since March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced on 2010. The deal amount was closer to $57 million USD as rumored. Freebase terms (which often correspond to Wikipedia articles) are called themes and the data stored on them will depend on their type. The reason why, Wikipedia Article on person positively effect search engine results is fully due to these cross exchange of data. Freebase does not follow the methodologies for W3C for the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies.
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Freebase : Using Basic Functions
First, you need to look at a person’s profile to understand the structure :
1 | https://www.freebase.com/m/01vrncs |
We honestly do not know whether Freebase disallows to add real data like Wikipedia where there is no indirect gain, possibly not as the owner is Google – but the basic concept can be used to create your own pool of data on your own domain and server and crawling will obviously happen due to the structure. In other words, this is the technical part. There is not much need to know too much. You can create a profile and add the key values :
like a reference of similar kind of ‘thing’ already available. Like we gave the above example.
