Hello,
It would be nice to have a page with some number showing how fast the database is growing.
Like:
New releations added in the last 24 hours
Releations deleted in the last 24 hours
Topics created in the last 24 hours
New releations added in the last 7 days
Releations deleted in the last 7 days
Topics created in the last 7 days
...
Or may be such a page already exists and I just don't know?
- Ralf
Well, we don't have all of these reports, but you can take a look at what we do have here... Reporting Tools for Freebase Experts
We hope to add more such tools in the future. Thanks for your interest and suggestions!
Data quality may be improved by helping users to use the apostrophe where appropriate (such as in "can't") instead of whatever apostrophe-resembling character they find on their non-US keyboard.
Earlier today I got no hits when searching for the movie title "Wild Hearts can't be Broken". The movie I expected did exist in Freebase, but wasn't found because the title contained a 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK' (U+2019) character where there should have been an 'APOSTROPHE' (U+0027) character. (I've fixed it now.)
This kind of thing is common and people who aren't particularly interested the fascinating subjects of character encoding and typography can't really be expected to get this right on their own.
Hi. The Freebase relevance engine powering search and autocomplete has special handling for characters such as aspostrophe and quote and allows users to find them without those characters. For example, you can find Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" with "loves labours lost", Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" with "telltale heart".
I will investigate why this does not seem to work with "wild hearts cant be broken". In general though, you can skip punctuations and substitute the English alphabet for accented characters in search, and it should work.
It would be helpful if the rank of autosuggested topics took into consideration the included types of the expected type. Here's an example:
If I am adding an influence, the autosuggest list should prioritize people over other types (films, magazines, etc), because people is an included type of the expected type (influence).
Would definitely increase my likelihood of going to Freebase.com
Hey Mike,
I thought this would be cool too. Unfortunately, it would be pretty "un-freebasy-semantic"; we would be searching for display name matches only since the MozSearch/OpenSearch doesn't support much more than that.
That being said, I did write a very rudimentary example that returns the top 30 results (no autocomplete). I'll send it to you.
Actually, someone already wrote one… but it broke when the Freebase search API changed. It’s being rewritten, and we will be sure to announce it when it’s ready!
If you build one that can take suggestions, you should definitely put up a prominent link on this site.
I wrote one for my personal use recently. Nothing fancy, but it at least allows me to quickly search Freebase. I just needed to get permission to use the Freebase icon before I make it public. Let me know if this is an issue, otherwise, you can install it from here.
I have re-written the search plugin (using OpenSearch description) that includes suggestions. Please delete the older version and replace it with this. I believe it will only work with Firefox for now, IE7 support will come later. Any feedback/suggestions are appreciated.
Beyond the ranking suggestion above, people have tried to add bands and tv shows to the influence domain, and I'm not really watching the additions that carefully.
Is there a way to require an included type (person, in this case)? Tv shows and bands aren't the focus for the domain, but beyond saying that in the description, it's hard to monitor.
Since it's not always appropriate to include all the suggested incoming properties in a schema, would it be possible to have a "What links here" page that shows the topics that link to this topic in one of their properties? It'd be useful for when you see an empty topic and wonder why it exists.
Sometimes you want to create similar types with minor differences. For example, I want my Patent Application type to be the same as my Patent type, less two properties.
I originally tried to have them both include a common base type, but that didn't give me the search fields I wanted. A function to copy all the properties of another type would make this easy.
We've heard this request before and it makes some sense. We're looking at a general method for copying types so that you could, for instance, copy types from sandbox to freebase. This kind of capability might meet your described need as well.
Has there been any progress on this? I'm also interested in cloning types but I'm also interested in cloning topics. For example, I may describe a topic using 20 attributes. I then want to describe another topic that is similar in all but one way. The only way I can see to do this is to re-enter all 20 attributes. Is it possible to provide an option for a new topic to inherit some or all attributes from an existing topic? This would allow me to just change the 1 attribute instead of all 20.
Actually, we're working more actively on this kind of feature than the one I previously described - something we're calling 'extended types', which would allow you to select an existing type to use all its properties but be able to add new properties to it - but this is probably at least a few weeks off at this point.
What do you think is most important? Adding, removing or relabeling properties from an extended type?
Depends on what you mean. If you are referring to the process of making an extended type, then it would be most important to exclude specific properties from the existing type with a single step. If the extended type is then treated as a regular type afterwards, the user could always add new types specific to it.
Brian, have you looked at using MQL (Metaweb Query Language) directly for some of the more advanced operations, such as mass creation of topics with very similar values, duplicating a type with minor changes, or querying for all topics meeting certain criteria? It's a more powerful way for developers to use Freebase data without going through the UI.
If you're interested, the API is a good place to start. Try things in the query editor on sandbox to see how they work.
Thanks if this was to me (Ed not Brian). I plan to delve into MQL soon. I'm trying to get a decent handle on data modeling first. Also, programming skill is not one of my strongest attributes.
Hello,
the new project of a detailed Encyclopedia of Life, which will include everything about life on earth could b a great source for freebase.
they use the CC of " Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported" so i believe you can use it,
the project will have more and more data as time passes by, so check it out:
http://www.eol.org
Doron.
I am quite proficient in a few languages and think that what would make freebase truly superb would be the ability to tag information (only relevant types – so strings but not numbers) with a language code. If you only speak english, then there might be the ability to autofill the tag with english, but for people who want to fill in data in other languages
For example, it would be nice to put both english and local names on famous international places... Japan vs. 日本 and so on. I know that the international forms are often listed as alternate names on topics but that doesn't (as far as I can see) provide a mechanism to tag a piece of information with its language.
This wouldn't be much use at first but might save freebase from growing pains later when foreign users start appearing and writing things in other languages, and feels like it should be relatively simple to add to the underlying database. I can go into more details about what I mean, if necessary.
Thanks again for the great product! I love it :)
Multilingual data is supported by our underlying data store and language flexibility is partly implemented—but right now, every user’s display language is forcibly set to English. This will change at some point, but keep the pressure on. (-:
ooh that's awesome! the only thing that gets me more excited than well structured information is a piece of software that takes other languages into account :P
crism, hello,
what about supporting a translation for all the Types as well.
not talking about translating the data only (like name in all language for a town for example) but to actually create a Type in language other then english, and have the system know its a translation of the same type, which is written in English.
thanks,
Doron.
Doron, part of the point of our multilingual structure is that the same
thing
may exist in the system with different
names
in different languages, but that it remains the same
thing
. A person, une personne, ein Person, 사람, 人, are all the same concept. We definitely don’t want a different type for person-in-French, person-in-German, etc.
I think, rereading your comment, that it may not be clear that the types in our system are not substantially different from the instances; a particular type, such as
Person
, is just an instance of
Type
. Accordingly, the labels on
Person
(and all