Circling back to my 10 March tagging deep-dive. More Freebase insight is coming out from those in on the closed-beta. This continues to look worthy of following closely for those interested in findability and relationships within data.
- Freebase: Life, the Universe, and Everything (Johannes la Poutré, 2 April 2007)
So far, my first impressions are overwhelming in a good sense. The Freebase already contains quite a few models as well as a lot of content, mostly imported from compatible sources like Wikipedia.
The future of Freebase will depend on the adoptation by developers and users equally. Will we be able to get the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, soon or will it become the next Dmoz project?
- In Like a moth to the Freebase flame Jon Udell (26 March 2007) provides some insight into use cases and to what extent are the data structures built out at this point:
I created my first user-defined Freebase type. Because the system is so new, there are some quite fundamental things that (so far as I can see) haven’t yet been defined. I wanted to create entries for some of my personal projects…so I created a type called Project and added the properties Goal and Collaborators. That enabled me to add entries for my two personal projects, describe their goals, and associate myself with them as a collaborator.
- Denny Vrandecic (16 March 2007) is favorable impressed although isn’t fully comfortable with the closed source:
…Semantic MediaWiki is totally open source, Metaweb, the system Freebase runs on, seems not to be. Well, if you ask me, Metaweb (also the name of the company) will probably want to sell MetaWeb to companies. And if you ask me again, these companies will make a great deal, because this may replace many current databases and many problems people have with them due to their rigid structure.
- And from Danny Ayers (15 March 2007)
They see the basis very much as a database, not an ontology kind of tool, although that’s really a matter of definitions. (If pressed, personally I’d call Atom an ontology). Users can create sharable types & properties, effectively in their own namespaces. This is starting to make it sound a bit heavy-going, but it isn’t at all. Tim O’Reilly wasn’t wrong about calling it addictive (check his screenshots). I’ve only fiddled a bit, but it is satisfying being able to organise stuff with an intuitive user interface. Plenty of Creative Commons logos on display. What Google Base could have been…
Additional Freebase insight from Danny Ayers earlier 9 March post and Metaweb’s co-founder Robert Cook addresses the Google Base comparison in his Freebasics blog on 20 March.
Again, for those interested in this subject area, the full posts AND the many substantive comments (including from Metaweb) are worth reading. Also see Tim O’Reilly’s My “Outdated View” of the Semantic Web and Different Approaches to the Semantic Web