Freebase: Discussion about General Support

General Support: Can I import a JSON dataset ?

2009-12-08T23:31:13.0000Z

Great, but I'm not sure how to :P

Should I write an app?

Thanks for your reply.

General Support: Can I import a JSON dataset ?

2009-12-08T22:22:34.0006Z

Sure, as long as it's appropriately licensed.

General Support: Can I import a JSON dataset ?

2009-12-08T22:17:58.0000Z

Generated with dbpedia.org/sparql ?

General Support: Can I export delicious bookmarks to Freebase?

2009-12-08T18:00:32.0013Z

I understand your general goal, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how tagging services will work in the example that you gave. A spreadsheet is definitely the most directly applicable approach, in my mind, but I see a couple of possibilities for tagging services.

If you use a service like Diigo that has a comment field, you could define a little meta language for describing attributes. e.g. Found: 1956 Owner: Rupert Murdoch etc...

This is flexible and powerful, but is completely free syntax with no tool support, so any errors won't get caught until you try and parse the information and find you can't understand it.

You could define a set of tags and meanings for their mappings so that a news web site that gets tagged with "Egypt" you interpret as meaning that they cover Egypt as geographic area of focus. You could extend this so that "hqEgypt" means headquartered in Egypt while "coverEgypt" means they cover Egypt, but this quickly explodes out of control (and is counter to how people expect the tags to work). The problem is that you basically trying to encode the column heading and cell value from your spreadsheet in a single tag. This only works well for a small universe of values (for example, your date founded example wouldn't fit very well like this).

It seems like a spreadsheet is a better fit for detailed data collection. Perhaps you could use a tiered approach with one set of people doing identification and basic categorization of sources with a smaller, more sophisticated followup team that use spreadsheets to capture the data (perhaps transcribed from a filled-in email template that you have people submit information via?).

I don't feel like I'm helping very much, but I don't think I know enough about conditions on the ground to be able to offer relevant advice.

General Support: Freebase API timing out repeatedly

2009-12-04T20:08:01.0006Z

Done: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Alpha and http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Beta -- still need to get people/groups within Metaweb to appropriately label their stuff, though. But in general, if it doesn't say "beta", isn't documented, or hasn't been officially announced then it's "alpha".

General Support: Can I export delicious bookmarks to Freebase?

2009-12-04T18:43:21.0006Z

Thanks for getting in touch Tom.

I want to create a base of media sources on Freebase. Our team of journalists is based in places like Gaza and Somalia with very low bandwidth and low experience of using tools as powerful as freebase. We want to encourage them to use very simple tools to supply the core data and then bulk upload this to freebase.

Imagining we used a spreadsheet to do this, each column entry would relate to the source (topic of our focus) by virtue of its row. And it would be defined as a property/type by virtue of its column head.

Could we replicate this on delicious or a similar bookmarking tool? That's to say, to have one account used to bookmark these sources. Tags would relate to the source url/ source name in the same way that rows would relate column entries to sources. These tag could also contain information contained in the column head of the spreadsheet.

So this entry in a spreadsheet:

Topic Date Founded Al Ahram 1956

Might become this tag: datefounded/1956

It seems a big issue for us is being able to enable our journalists and data researchers to do the leg work using tools they know and understand. Unfortunately, due to funding constraints, we don't have the resources to build an app to talk with freebase and enable this work to happen directly into freebase. A spreadsheet seems the most obvious solution, but a bookmarking tool would enable us to grow more community around our effort.

I'd be grateful of your thoughts.

Thanks, George

General Support: Freebase API timing out repeatedly

2009-12-04T18:11:53.0005Z

Tom: you can use it, but if it breaks you're more or less on your own. Or you can email the developer directly.

(Really need to write up that page on "Alpha" vs "Beta" features/products -- will do that today.)

General Support: Can I export delicious bookmarks to Freebase?

2009-12-04T18:02:32.0000Z

Can you explain a little bit more about what you are trying to do?

Tags/folksonomies tend to get used differently than more structured data like Freebase has. Because the tag namespace is flat, there's no way of telling whether #apple refers to the fruit or computer company or record label or ..., other than convention and looking at the things which are tagged. Because of this, you'd probably need some type of human assisted mapping of tags to Freebase types/instances to get things to work correctly.

Also, Freebase isn't really set up to be a generic bookmark repository. You can add a web link (or links) to any given topic (and create new topics about web sites), but usually the URL is just a small part of the structured information available about a topic.

General Support: Freebase API timing out repeatedly

2009-12-04T17:54:29.0005Z

Skud - jg suggested the use of the 'page' parameter on the developers list. Should I not be using it?

Owen - You've understood cursors correctly. The returned cursor will be false/empty when you reach the end of the list. The query editor will allow you to play with cursors (and the page parameter) from the freebase.com web client.

General Support: Ares

2009-12-04T16:14:06.0006Z

Freebase is not a place to advertise P2P clients. Doing so is in breach of the Terms of Service and will get your account blocked if you continue.

General Support: Can I export delicious bookmarks to Freebase?

2009-12-04T11:40:46.0025Z

Is there a way to use tags to import data into freebase?

General Support: Ares

2009-12-04T10:33:32.0009Z

Ares Ares.net is the official Ares download site for the popular Ares P2P software. Ares downloads music and video files from peers that are connected to the Ares network as well as torrents. Now available for Windows 7.

General Support: Freebase API timing out repeatedly

2009-12-03T22:46:44.0013Z

Okay... and cursors work like this?

I start with this query:

http://api.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query={%22cursor%22:true,%22query%22:[{%22name%22:null,%22type%22:%22/people/person%22,%22limit%22:100}]}

Then, the next query is replaced by the cursor received from the previous one and that continues until there are no results?

General Support: Freebase API timing out repeatedly

2009-12-03T22:30:55.0030Z

I'm afraid that the page parameter is an undocumented, unsupported "alpha" feature. Have you tried using cursors? Do you have the same problem with them?

General Support: Freebase API timing out repeatedly

2009-12-03T22:20:32.0000Z

Hello, I am trying to cycle through all pages in the /people/person category and I am always timing out when I get to a high page number. I know that there are approx 1.9mm entries in this category, but as I cycle to, say, page 10,000 it times out. Example query below: http://api.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query={%22page%22:10000,%22query%22:[{%22name%22:null,%22type%22:%22/people/person%22,%22limit%22:100}]} Any insight would be great. -Owen

General Support: "help" link

2009-11-30T18:40:53.0013Z

Yeah, the absence of the word 'help' from anywhere in the UI can be confusing. We decided to move all that stuff to 'Build' which contains information on how to build a base and contribute data to freebase in general:

http://www.freebase.com/build

General Support: "help" link

2009-11-30T17:04:40.0018Z

I sent a client a link to a base view. He was very interested and asked, "Where is this stuff documented?". So I looked around as if I was new to freebase and realize it isn't obvious how to learn more. On a few page there isn't a link to anything labeled "help" or "learn". On the user home page there is a panel on the left with links to"Resources". One link, "What is Freebase" seems like it might be a starting point, but it doesn't have links to a general help section. Eventually I found a "Help Center" link in a breadcrumb. That link goes to the "Build" homepage which looks like the best starting point for a new user. So, all this is to ask for a link called "Help Center" be displayed somewhere on every page. For most pages the bottom would be fine. For a user homepage I would like to see a more prominent link.

General Support: How to list the original 78rpm recordings?

2009-11-26T20:34:21.0017Z

Thanks. For 78s there might be one or two tracks. Though I may know the title and artist and possibly the release date I would have to know the 'catalog number' to associate one side with the other. In the case where I don't know the catalog number should I not describe the title, artist, and the rest of the single side? Is there a way to associate tracks with 'albums' after the tracks are entered? Is there a convention for naming the 'album' when it doesn't have a name (like for 45s or individual 78s) - like Label: Catalog Number? How does that hold up if the 78 actually was in one of those album sets?