I know this site has been using data from other massive sources such as Wikipedia and musicbrainz but what about MobyGames.com?
It can be said that MobyGames has become the ultimate place for information about video games. I think it would be a very good source of data.
All, obviously, if there aren't any licensing issues and if the migration process is not any hard (but I think nothing can be harder than getting data from Wikipedia textual streams).
I agree that MobyGames' data is great.
At the bottom of their web pages it says: "MobyGames™ Copyright © 1999-2008, MobyGames. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form"
They may be willing to provide some of their factual data to Freebase, but so far (as far as I know) nobody has spoken with them.
Hello,
It would be nice to have a page with some number showing how fast the database is growing.
Like:
New releations added in the last 24 hours
Releations deleted in the last 24 hours
Topics created in the last 24 hours
New releations added in the last 7 days
Releations deleted in the last 7 days
Topics created in the last 7 days
...
Or may be such a page already exists and I just don't know?
- Ralf
Well, we don't have all of these reports, but you can take a look at what we do have here... Reporting Tools for Freebase Experts
We hope to add more such tools in the future. Thanks for your interest and suggestions!
Data quality may be improved by helping users to use the apostrophe where appropriate (such as in "can't") instead of whatever apostrophe-resembling character they find on their non-US keyboard.
Earlier today I got no hits when searching for the movie title "Wild Hearts can't be Broken". The movie I expected did exist in Freebase, but wasn't found because the title contained a 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK' (U+2019) character where there should have been an 'APOSTROPHE' (U+0027) character. (I've fixed it now.)
This kind of thing is common and people who aren't particularly interested the fascinating subjects of character encoding and typography can't really be expected to get this right on their own.
Hi. The Freebase relevance engine powering search and autocomplete has special handling for characters such as aspostrophe and quote and allows users to find them without those characters. For example, you can find Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" with "loves labours lost", Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" with "telltale heart".
I will investigate why this does not seem to work with "wild hearts cant be broken". In general though, you can skip punctuations and substitute the English alphabet for accented characters in search, and it should work.
It would be helpful if the rank of autosuggested topics took into consideration the included types of the expected type. Here's an example:
If I am adding an influence, the autosuggest list should prioritize people over other types (films, magazines, etc), because people is an included type of the expected type (influence).
Would definitely increase my likelihood of going to Freebase.com
Hey Mike,
I thought this would be cool too. Unfortunately, it would be pretty "un-freebasy-semantic"; we would be searching for display name matches only since the MozSearch/OpenSearch doesn't support much more than that.
That being said, I did write a very rudimentary example that returns the top 30 results (no autocomplete). I'll send it to you.
Actually, someone already wrote one… but it broke when the Freebase search API changed. It’s being rewritten, and we will be sure to announce it when it’s ready!
If you build one that can take suggestions, you should definitely put up a prominent link on this site.
I wrote one for my personal use recently. Nothing fancy, but it at least allows me to quickly search Freebase. I just needed to get permission to use the Freebase icon before I make it public. Let me know if this is an issue, otherwise, you can install it from here.
I have re-written the search plugin (using OpenSearch description) that includes suggestions. Please delete the older version and replace it with this. I believe it will only work with Firefox for now, IE7 support will come later. Any feedback/suggestions are appreciated.
Beyond the ranking suggestion above, people have tried to add bands and tv shows to the influence domain, and I'm not really watching the additions that carefully.
Is there a way to require an included type (person, in this case)? Tv shows and bands aren't the focus for the domain, but beyond saying that in the description, it's hard to monitor.
Since it's not always appropriate to include all the suggested incoming properties in a schema, would it be possible to have a "What links here" page that shows the topics that link to this topic in one of their properties? It'd be useful for when you see an empty topic and wonder why it exists.
Sometimes you want to create similar types with minor differences. For example, I want my Patent Application type to be the same as my Patent type, less two properties.
I originally tried to have them both include a common base type, but that didn't give me the search fields I wanted. A function to copy all the properties of another type would make this easy.
We've heard this request before and it makes some sense. We're looking at a general method for copying types so that you could, for instance, copy types from sandbox to freebase. This kind of capability might meet your described need as well.
Has there been any progress on this? I'm also interested in cloning types but I'm also interested in cloning topics. For example, I may describe a topic using 20 attributes. I then want to describe another topic that is similar in all but one way. The only way I can see to do this is to re-enter all 20 attributes. Is it possible to provide an option for a new topic to inherit some or all attributes from an existing topic? This would allow me to just change the 1 attribute instead of all 20.
Actually, we're working more actively on this kind of feature than the one I previously described - something we're calling 'extended types', which would allow you to select an existing type to use all its properties but be able to add new properties to it - but this is probably at least a few weeks off at this point.
What do you think is most important? Adding, removing or relabeling properties from an extended type?
Depends on what you mean. If you are referring to the process of making an extended type, then it would be most important to exclude specific properties from the existing type with a single step. If the extended type is then treated as a regular type afterwards, the user could always add new types specific to it.
Brian, have you looked at using MQL (Metaweb Query Language) directly for some of the more advanced operations, such as mass creation of topics with very similar values, duplicating a type with minor changes, or querying for all topics meeting certain criteria? It's a more powerful way for developers to use Freebase data without going through the UI.
If you're interested, the API is a good place to start. Try things in the query editor on sandbox to see how they work.
Thanks if this was to me (Ed not Brian). I plan to delve into MQL soon. I'm trying to get a decent handle on data modeling first. Also, programming skill is not one of my strongest attributes.