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Intermediate
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Conventions for naming Types
A type will contain a list of instances. For example, Type 'person' will have many instances, each one with a name. However, when viewing each person, you'll want to have it display "Joe Smith, person" not "Joe Smith, people"....
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Adding Properties to Types
Properties are the building blocks of a Type. They operate like fields in a web form when a user is editing a topic of that type. There are some default properties that are included in every new Type. These are: Each property has a display...
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- Delegated Properties ,
- Incoming and Reciprocal Properties ,
- Enumerated Properties ,
- Using Property Hints
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Core property types
There are a number of Core System Types that can be used for expected types that have special display characteristics. The most useful ones are listed here.
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Incoming and Reciprocal Properties
When looking at a type you've created in schema editor you might see a header at the bottom the page that says Incoming Properties . This means that some other user thinks your type is so cool, they've linked to it from a property within one of...
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Property Display Settings
There are a number of settings in Schema editor that you can use to control how properties are displayed.
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Included Types
Included types are types that are included with another type and are automatically added to a topic when it is typed with the including type . For instance, if /type/person is an included type on /type/actor, then a topic that is typed as actor will...
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Using Property Hints
Property hints are displayed when a user clicks on the ? icon after clicking edit next to a property name, or as the Property Description when a viewing a property in the schema editor. Property hints are added to a property through the Schema Editor...
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Enumerated Types
After carefully working out the schema for your type, you might be worried about what other users will enter for the property values on specific topics. What if some joker comes along and decides to enter "hermaphrodite" for someone's...
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X-Metaweb-Request
This header is provided for use with services that write to freebase. It is one of the mechanisms in place to get around the problem of cross-site request forgery. To allow HTML forms to use the service APIs, the services accept form POST requests...
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View the developer toolbar
To view the developer toolbar, click F8 while viewing any Freebase page, then scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see all kinds of useful information and links to some handy pages for expert users.
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Incoming links
Get all incoming links for a specific topic. Restricted to return only links from objects type topic and user_profile.
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Guids Are Faster than IDs
Freebase ids and guids are both unambiguous ways of referencing topics in Freebase. If you're running queries which return a large number of values and you'd like to get a key to reference them by, asking for guid rather than the id can be...
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Voting on Flagged Topics
From the homepage, users can now help clean up Freebase data by reviewing flagged topics. Flagged topics have been marked by other users as candidates for merge or delete. If a flagged topic gets sufficient votes for merge or delete, the operation...
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Handle generalized dates
In the graph we can represent the date as 2007, 2007-10, 2007-10-03, etc..technically these dates are UTC.Unfortunately when this gets loaded into a Javascript object in the browser, it gets converted to an absolute time (like Jan 1, 2007 at 0:00UTC...
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Read properties of a type
This brings up the general concept of "default_property" If I ask for two property values with null and []:
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Merging musical data
There is sometimes confusion when voting on merging musical albums, releases, and tracks, due to the detailed Freebase data model for recorded music. This is an attempt to provide guidance in those situations. Merging between types. This should never...
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Wikipedia article text
Freebase doesn't store wikipedia articles. Freebase provides the wikipedia key so that you can get the article from wikipedia.
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Mark for deletion
You can use this query to mark something for deletion:
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Combine queries
I query for ID's belonging to a , after that (extracting IDs with PHP), I query foreach ID what CATEGORY, it is in and whats its name: Now the question is, if it is possible to merge both: "Query for CATEGORIES (and name of given IDs) of a given " ...
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Understanding User Groups and Roles
User groups are, as you might expect, groups of users in Freebase. Featured users and Metaweb staff are a couple of obvious examples of these. Typically, these user groups are attached to bases. There are a few special user groups that have defined...
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Using the Filter View
Looking for a set of topics that share particular characteristics? Interested in finding ones that have empty property fields you can complete? Want to create a special collection of topics within one of your domains to share with others? Or...
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Co-type Definition
A co-type refers to an additional type that is added to a topic. For example, the topic Ernest Hemingway is co-typed Person, Deceased Person, Film Writer, Author, Award Winner, and Influence Node. Note that there is no inheritance between...
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Compound Value Type (CVT) Definition
A compound value type (CVT) is an element that ties together properties from several types. Typically (and trickily) a compound value type doesn't have a display name because it is only a container object for a group of...
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Disambiguator Definition
In a type schema, properties can be set to Display as Disambiguator. The Film type, for example, has an Initial Release Date property that is set as a disambiguator. This means on any topic that displays films, the film's name will be paired with...
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Enumerated Type Definition
An object of /type/enumeration that has a specified enumeration namespace. For each instance of the enumerated type, MQL creates a unique identifier, or key, in the enumerated namespace. Enumerated types allow you to refer to instances of the type...
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Enumeration Definition
An enumeration is a namespace in which MQL creates human-readable unique indentifiers for instances. This identifier can be used as a foreign key to simplify reconciliation between Freebase and other datasets, provides a way to access Freebase...
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Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) Definition
A unique numerical identifier assigned to every Freebase topic and to primitives. The GUID for this topic, for example, is 9202a8c04000641f8000000008745cde, and can be seen in your browser's URL window.
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Reciprocal Property Definition
A reciprocal property is one that is linked to a similar property in another type. When information for one of those properties is entered for a Freebase topic, that topic is automatically linked as an entry for the...
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The MQL Cookbook
The MQL Cookbook is for examples of MQL queries that may be of use to other developers or general Freebase users. If you have a query you'd like to add to the cookbook, please type it Help Topic, enter MQL for the Help Center property, ...
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Creating New Types with the Schema Editor
The Schema Editor provides an easy interface for creating and editing the properties, known collectively as the schema, for a type. This topic covers the basic process of creating a new property as well as some of the available options. ...
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Creating Help Topics for Your Base
After you've created a base and others have begun contributing to it, you might want to create some Help topics that are specific to it. The Music and Publishing commons, for example, already have a number of help topics on subjects like how to...
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Common API Query Parameters
For APIs which require this header, this header can be set to any value. Javascript toolkits typically set this to XMLHttpRequest when making requests from the browser. This header is required to defeat cross-site request forgery. Because the...
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Delegated Properties
Delegated properties are properties that exist in one type that you want to include in a type you're creating. For example, say you're creating a type called Band Leader and you want to use the Place Musical Career Began property from Musical...
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Delegated Property Definition
Delegated properties are properties that exist in one type that you want to include in a type you're creating. For example, say you're creating a type called Band Leader and you want to use the Place Musical Career Began property from Musical Artist...
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MQL Cheatsheet
The MQL cheatsheet provides an overview of the syntax for MQL queries, including directives, outer envelope parameters, wildcards, numeric and textual comparisons, as well as the sytax and directives for MQL write commands, all in a compact, easy-to...
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Using the Query Editor
The Query Editor is a tool to help you formulate and see the results of Metaweb Query Language (MQL) queries. You can use the Query Editor in conjunction with the MQL Reference Guide to teach yourself MQL, test queries for use in hosted...
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How to Attribute Topic Descriptions to Wikipedia
Under the terms of our licensing policy, we ask that anyone using a topic description that originates from Wikipedia to attribute that description to Wikipedia. You can find out whether a description is contributed by a user, or comes from a...
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What is / isn't a topic alias?
Topic aliases (/common/topic/alias) are short snippets of text that provide alternate names to topics in Freebase.
