The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Can someone please fix the typography and layout of this page

2008-09-11T22:44:09.0025Z

This is a problem caused by an update in the CSS used to layout the page, and some faulty mark-up in the original file. We hope to have this all fixed in the next couple weeks when the new version of the manual is posted.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: c# example

2008-09-11T22:42:42.0025Z

Hey there, sorry it took so long, I was on vacation when you posted this. I've added the code to our Application Developer Tips and will add it to the full manual when the next version goes live in a couple weeks.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: * doesn't appear to process a single word as stated

2008-09-11T19:35:02.0012Z

Hey Maccaday, I found something in the new, updated version of the MQL manual that we'll be publishing soon that may explain your problem. If you're trying to use the wildcard for phrase matching, where you want word order respected and the wildcard to stand-in for one word, you need to use escaped quotes around the phrase. So, instead of:

{
"name" : null,
"name~=" : "I * you",
"type" : "/music/track"
}

you would need to use the following query to get all track names that contain the phrase "I * you" :

{
"name" : null,
"name~=" : "\"I * you\"",
"type" : "/music/track"
}

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: * doesn't appear to process a single word as stated

2008-09-11T17:38:33.0014Z

Further investigation has revealed some genuine wonkiness in the use of the single * as a wildcard; as soon as we track down what's really happening we'll try to fix the functionality and the documentation as well. Stay tuned, but please do send me that query so we can have a test case to work with.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Limit and offset

2008-09-11T17:05:20.0012Z

Sorry; the cursor needs to go in the query envelope, not the query itself. See §4.7 of the API doc:

{

"cursor":null,

"query" : {

"limit" : 5,

"name" : null,

"type" : "/music/artist"

}

The cursor is not the same as offset; we don’t currently have arbitrary offset support. The cursor must be sent back to the server to get the next page of results; a query can’t yet skip forward an arbitrary number of results.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: * doesn't appear to process a single word as stated

2008-09-11T16:57:17.0012Z

Hey Maccaday, can you provide both the query you were using and the results? * can be used to match any single word, so "I * you" will return both "I love you" and "I hate you," so it's possible to get the kind of results you describe, depending on what the query was. Send that info on and I'll try to figure out what's up and, if necessary, correct the docs.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: * doesn't appear to process a single word as stated

2008-09-11T16:55:00.0019Z

HI Maccaday, can you tell me what the query was, and what results were returned? * matches any single word, so "I * you" matches both "I love you" and "I hate you." So, depending on the query, it's possible to get the kind of results you describe, but I'd need to see the query and the results before I can figure out what's going on.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: * doesn't appear to process a single word as stated

2008-09-11T16:06:50.0019Z

Good catch, thanks. I filed a bug with our doc team on that.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Limit and offset

2008-09-11T04:15:04.0012Z

Wouldn't using the 'offset' reserved word be a more elegant (and intuitive for those with experience in databases) method of implementing this?

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Limit and offset

2008-09-11T04:03:38.0012Z

Can you explain this a little further, please? I tried the query :

{
"cursor" : null,
"limit" : 5,
"name" : null,
"type" : "/music/artist"
}

and I got an error saying that cursor was a reserved word.

Thanks

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: * doesn't appear to process a single word as stated

2008-09-11T03:27:11.0018Z

In the documentation it says that * matches a single word, but when I ran the queries for band names with two / three names, the lists were the same. The number of *'s and spaces didn't seem to make a difference to the search.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: c# example

2008-08-29T04:26:34.0012Z

Thanks, weblivz! Probably the best place to put this is under Application Developer Tips, but I'm copying our docs guy, Phil, on this so he can help you out.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: c# example

2008-08-19T17:42:53.0017Z

As there is not one above, i created a C# version here :

http://tinyurl.com/6y6hea

If anyone knows a good place to put it please do so. New to this so don't wanna edit the description of the article!

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Can someone please fix the typography and layout of this page

2008-08-13T21:37:28.0005Z

Thanks for letting us know - I have heard that it was a bug in this release and will be fixed in the next one.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Can someone please fix the typography and layout of this page

2008-08-13T21:11:39.0017Z

Dense, hard-to-understand material is made doubly difficult to read and process by lousy typography. The way that headers and lists are smooshed into each other on this page makes it very difficult to understand.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Limit and offset

2008-08-04T13:23:58.0000Z

You use cursors. Ask for cursor:null in your first query. It will come back with a token filled in; pass that back to get the next set of results and a new cursor.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Limit and offset

2008-08-04T13:06:21.0010Z

I figured enough that you can use "limit" reserved to get the first few results of a query,

say for some query

"limit" : 5

this fetches the first five ,

how do I fetch the next 5

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: bidirectional links

2008-06-17T22:20:16.0007Z

All links are truly bidirectional. The client may not show them, but that is not the same thing. The Explore view (change view to tools/explore in the URL, or hit F8 to expose the tool bar at the bottom of the page) shows all incoming and outgoing links. Non-reciprocated properties can also be accessed in MQL using the ! operator:

{
"!/music/release/artist" : [
    {
      "name" : null
    }
],
"id" : "/en/the_beatles"
}

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: bidirectional links

2008-06-17T21:36:05.0012Z

"One of the fundamental aspects of Metaweb is that all links between nodes are bi-directional."

Is this really true? There are properties that have no reverse property defined, and are in effect unidirectional.

These can be found with the following query:

[
{
    "id" : null,
    "limit" : 10,
    "reverse_property" : {
      "id" : null,
      "optional" : "forbidden"
    },
    "type" : "/type/property"
}
]

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Howto forbid a property from existing

2008-06-12T22:09:49.0005Z

something which is not documented here is that "optional" : "forbidden" can be used to require that nothing like that object exist.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Retrieivng data for multiple guid's with a single equery

2008-06-11T07:40:30.0007Z

Thanks for the pointer gmackenz. I was searching for the wrong terms and getting zero results. You pointed me in the right direction:

http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000001170a3
http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/blurb/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000001170a3
http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/blurb/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000038e04d?maxlength=300

As discussed in detail here

http://markmail.org/message/fot76nyzeprvsgly#query:+page:1+mid:hkzgwbs6pbznui4w+state:results
http://markmail.org/message/fot76nyzeprvsgly#query:freebase.com%20API%2Ftrans+page:1+mid:balofou7axzv53vr+state:results

Thanks,
biosopher

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Retrieivng data for multiple guid's with a single equery

2008-06-10T23:58:21.0000Z

Your excellent question here (and also on the Query Builder page) might already be answered in the archives of the App developers mail list (linked to on the App page). In fact I know the question about getting the description was answered recently on one of our two mail lists.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Retrieivng data for multiple guid's with a single equery

2008-06-10T23:01:56.0012Z

I need to obtain data across multiple guid's within a single query. E.g. this simple query gets the name for a single guid. Is there a way to pass in multiple IDs to get back information on each? I.e. I don't want to perform 100's of individual queries.

{

"id" : "/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000023907a",

"name" : null,

}

Thanks,
biosopher

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Fetching Content with trans

2008-06-08T10:14:57.0005Z

section 4.8 states "The trans service does not support a callback parameter as the mqlread service does", this is outdated since the api states it can and it can:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000007628edf

The trans example could use some improvement too since it is digging out "unrelated" documents from the store. It would be more informative and more consistent to get documents on the band "the police"

Query to get guid's for articles and images
{
"article" : [
    {
      "guid" : [
        {}
      ],
      "id" : null
    }
],
"id" : "/en/the_police",
"image" : [
    {
      "guid" : [
        {}
      ],
      "id" : null
    }
],
"type" : "/common/topic"
}

Query to get the article (function foo can format result without using a proxy):
http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000006df25?callback=foo

Query to get the image (you can use this as the source property of the image element)
http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/image_thumb/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000003c18713?maxwidth=300&maxheight=300
Note: you cannot make an image bigger than the origional with maxwith and maxheight

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: sort by random

2008-06-06T07:11:39.0007Z

Good morning all.

Has a random feature become manifest in the meantime or is is on the agenda?

Cheers

martin

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Writing Weblink

2008-06-03T17:50:41.0000Z

The type /common/topic has a property "webpage" that you can use. All topics should include /common/topic as one of the types (although it won't be listed explicitly on the page) -- it's what gives them the images, weblinks, description, and "also known as" properties.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: Writing Weblink

2008-05-31T20:26:55.0012Z

It looks like it isn't possible to use the write service to create weblinks, as it's outside the schema. But maybe I'm wrong.

If we want to establish a link for an object, am I correct in guessing that the schema would need to incorporate a link property?

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: sort by random

2008-04-01T02:47:13.0007Z

Currently there is no way to have MQL return a random set of items. You might want to post this as an enhancement request here.

The Complete Metaweb Query Language (MQL) Reference Guide: sort by random

2008-03-28T21:47:37.0012Z

is there any way to retrieve a random item in list of items? I often run into scenarios where i want to test a random series of (valid) us addresses against my business rules. it would be great if i could so something like this:

{

  "query" : [
    {
      "citytown" : null,
      "limit" : 10,
      "sort" : random,
      "state_province_region" : null,
      "street_address" : null,
      "type" : "/location/mailing_address"
    }
  ]