Build a Base!

• What is a base?
• What does a base look like?
• Why would I make a base?
• What type of information belongs in a base?
• Can I protect the information in my base?
• How do bases relate to the rest of Freebase?

What is a base?

A base is a new type of website that anyone can build using the free, open data in Freebase. It is a place to organize and share collections of information about a particular subject, like San Francisco, American Comedy, or The Smurfs.

Bases can encompass many things, but they all share common characteristics:

• They are structured. Unlike wikis, which focus on text articles, bases focus on structured information, like facts, figures, and lists of things. This means the information in a base is easy to sort, filter, query, mash up, and export to other applications.
• They are open. Anyone can build and contribute to a base, so the content grows and improves over time. You can start with something fun and easy, like a list of cartoon robots or dive bars in San Diego. As more people visit your base and add items of their own, the information grows. Soon the base becomes a great resource for fans, enthusiasts, and information seekers around the globe.
• They are free. Bases are free to make and free to reuse. Anyone can use the data from a base in their own website or application, as long as they provide proper attribution back to the Freebase community.

What does a base look like?

You can customize your base with your own color schemes and graphics, but all bases have common features:

1. Views. Views are the focal point of bases. They are the individual items that members of a base spend time creating, improving, and showing off to others.
   At a basic level, a view is just a named collection of topics, like TV Actors, 80s Food and Drinks, or Baseball players born in San Francisco. Views can be displayed as lists or galleries, and can be sorted by any property field in the included topics.
   Views are easy to create. Check out the Using the Filter View help topic to learn how.
2. News. This is a feed of the latest activity within the base. It highlights new content, discussions, and contributions that have been made.
3. Members. These are the people who have joined the base. Joining a base is just a way to say that you’re interested in that subject so that Freebase can send you news and updates related to it on your homepage. It’s also a way to get involved with a base and to find people who share your interests.
4. Schema. The schema section is mostly for base administrators who deal with the technical details of the base. The schema determines which information fields show up on each of the topic pages in the base. You can check out the help topics on Creating Schemas and Creating New Types with the Schema Editor to learn how this works, but most people don’t need to worry about it.
5. Weblinks. These are links to other bases and third-party websites that the members of a base think are useful and relevant.
6. Help. Each base has its own help section. This is meant  for issues that are very specific to that base, like community policies, goals, and instructions for creating topics or completing topic information.

We plan to offer more customization options for your base in the future, so stay tuned! In the meantime, please contact us if anything needs further clarification.

Why would I make a base?

There are a number of reasons why you might want to make a base. For example:

• To meet and collaborate with people who share your interests. Do you love Battlestar Galactica? Hang gliding? Whatever your passions are, it’s fun to meet people who share them. Building a base is a great way to get involved and find others around the globe who love what you love.
• To create something for the world. When you look for something on the web, you often just want a neat, clean page with only the information you’re looking for. Who are the characters in Dilbert? Which public companies have female CEOs? What are all of the neighborhoods in Portland? Create a base for whatever you think is interesting and useful, and help make the Internet a better place!
• To publish and share your dataset. A custom-branded base is a great way to share your dataset with others. It allows you to connect your data with other bases, making it more meaningful and discoverable. And it allows developers to build cool apps on top of it.
• To share information about your business or organization. Do you have a product catalog you want to share? A database related to your nonprofit? Publish it on Freebase to promote and distribute your content across the web.
• For fun. Once you get started building a base, you’ll find it can be kind of fun. Jump in and make one, and see where it takes you!

What type of information belongs in a base?

Bases are optimized for structured information, like facts, figures, and lists, and are designed to be shared, free resources for the world. Things that don’t belong in a base include long articles without structured information, encrypted data, copyrighted content, or data that is not “generally useful.” The Freebase Contribution Guidelines explain what this means in more detail. And if you have any questions about it, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Can I protect the information in my base?

By default, the information in a base can be edited by anyone. This allows others to add to and improve your base, making it bigger and better as time goes on. To help prevent vandalism, we have a number of tools that anyone can use to monitor and revert bad edits.

If you have a complete and authoritative dataset that would not benefit from user contributions, feel free to contact us and let us know. We’re happy to discuss “read only” options in cases where an openly editable model does not make sense.

In general, we expect capabilities around privacy and read protection to expand in the future, so please let us know if you have any feedback or related feature requests.

How do bases relate to the rest of Freebase?

The collection of user-created bases is a very important part of Freebase as a whole. The other part of Freebase is the Freebase Commons.

The Freebase Commons is a collection of over 4 million topics that users can draw from when they’re creating a base. These topics are grouped together by subject so that they’re easy to browse. The Film Commons, for example, contains nearly 300,000 topics related to the movie industry, and the Business Commons contains 725,000 topics on companies, board members, and other business related subjects.

Over time, the community will promote the highest quality bases to the Freebase Commons so that anyone can reuse and add to them.