Frequently Asked Questions

Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. "Open" means it's built by the community, for the community — anyone can contribute information, create collections of information to share with others, build applications that use our API. It also means that the database is freely, openly licensed. Freebase already contains millions of facts in dozens of categories spanning people, locations, books, movies, music, companies, science, sports, and more, and is growing daily, thanks to the efforts of a passionate, global user community.

Freebase is unique among online databases because a single Freebase topic can encompass many different kinds of information. In other databases there would have to be a separate topic for each category, or a completely separate database. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger would appear in a movie database as an actor, a political database as a governor, and a bodybuilder database as a Mr. Universe. In Freebase there is one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger that contains information about all three facets of his public life. The unified topic acts as an information hub, making it easy to find and contribute information about him regardless of what kind of information it is.

What makes this possible is a flexible underlying structure that is very different from conventional databases that use rigid organizational structures, or schema, to organize information. Freebase's open, wiki-like approach to information organization means that Freebase can grow without formal, centralized planning. As a result, anyone can contribute information about their areas of interest, create new schemas to organize information, or build collections of topics that reveal new, interesting, and fun relationships among their subjects. The technically inclined can even develop their own applications that use Freebase information. We provide application developers with tools like API services, the Metaweb Query Language, and the hosted Acre development environment, and they create applications for new Web browsing experiences, finding buildings designed by famous architects, or showing who influenced who.

Wikipedia and Freebase both appeal to people who love to use and organize information, but the difference lies in the type of information covered, and the way it's organized. Wikipedia arranges information in the form of articles, while Freebase lists facts and statistics. Freebase information is good not only for people who want to research facts, but also for people who want to use those facts to build other websites and applications. Information in article form can’t be reused in the same way, though it is great for other purposes.

Google Base is a database like Freebase, but with much different features and information coverage. The information in Freebase is all shared and collectively editable, with a single topic containing information about its subject across multiple categories. Google Base, on the other hand, helps other people find your information, but is much more focused on items, listings, and events, and isn't designed to be edited by the community or to reconcile similar topics across information categories.

There are several things you can do with Freebase:

First, you can browse topics and search for information. If you’re looking for something specific, use the search and filter features. Almost every fact in Freebase is a link to more information, so there's a lot to explore and discover.

When you're looking at topics, you can also add and edit information. See a blank space? Fill it in! See a mistake? Correct it! All it takes is the click of an edit button next to the fact you want to correct or the field you want to fill in.

After you've had a chance to see what's in Freebase, you can add your own topics, or create collections of topics that you can share, and develop, with others. You can even contribute large sets of information that you've created, like lists of authors or motorcycle parts, comic book characters or buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. If you've got a really large collection of information you want to contribute, contact us for help with a bulk upload.

You can also contribute new schemas for organizing information and creating relationships among facts. Schema building is also known as data modeling, and we’ve written up some guidelines for tackling it in Freebase.

Finally, you can build applications that use Freebase information. We've got a list of current Freebase applications that might inspire you, a guide to developing Freebase applications, and tools like API services, the Acre hosted application environment, and the mjt templating language for client-side applications to get you started.

Much of the information in Freebase is directly contributed by our user community. In addition, our internal team works to incorporate facts from many large, publicly available information sources like the Securities and Exchange Commission, MusicBrainz, and Wikipedia.

Freebase has the same model of community collaboration and editing that has proven to be so successful for Wikipedia and other open information projects. While some inaccurate information is inevitable, that same information can be corrected by anyone, and people make incremental improvements all the time. (For more information on our approach to intentional errors, see our Contribution Guidelines .) We have also developed a group of trusted experts to help keep an eye on things, and we believe that the efforts of a whole community keeps our information moving in the right direction.

Freebase data is available for use under a Creative Commons license known as an “attribution” or “by” license. Under the terms of this license you're welcome to use information from Freebase in your own site or applications, as long as you credit Freebase as the source. Put another way: information in Freebase is available for commercial or non-commercial purposes — just remember to attribute it to Freebase.com and the community that created it.

No. It’s free to use, whether you’re browsing, editing, uploading, or using Freebase information for your own purposes. That's why it's called “Freebase.”

Under the hood Freebase is a graph database. This means that instead of using tables and keys to define data structures, Freebase defines its data structure as a set of nodes and a set of links that establish relationships between the nodes. Because its data structure is non-hierarchical, Freebase can model much more complex relationships between individual elements than a conventional database, and is open for users to enter new objects and relationships into the underlying graph.

The Freebase database is not open source, meaning we don't make our source code available to others for further development. However, the information contained in Freebase is open to anyone to use in their own applications provided they give proper attribution to the Freebase community, as described in our licensing policy.

Freebase does offer some open source tools, such as the freebase-suggest jquery plugin, and a freebase python library, that you can check out through download.freebase.com.

We believe fundamentally that information wants to be, and should be, free. In that sense we are connected to the ideas and intentions behind open data, but we have no formal relationship with other open data projects. Though the the definition of open data is pretty loose, we try to follow general open data principals by not restricting access to Freebase information to registered users, charging users to access our information, imposing restrictive licenses over the use of Freebase information, or using proprietary or closed technology as a barrier to accessing Freebase information.

Metaweb is a technology company based in San Francisco. Freebase is the product we have spent the last few years developing.

Right now we're much more focused on creating Freebase than monetizing it, but we do have a few ideas. As a semantic web platform, Freebase can power many valuable applications. For instance, Freebase can bring web applications to life, improve search results, connect people with products, and make ads more relevant. We're already investing and partnering in a number of projects along these lines, and expect to attract more of these opportunities as our product continues to improve. At some point we also expect to deliver targeted advertising on Freebase.com.

The discussion associated with each topic in Freebase is a great way to get in touch. You can also use our Feedback form, to send a bug report, feature request, or other Freebase.com-related communications directly to our staffers. For communications about Metaweb Technologies, like press releases or employment, send an email to the appropriate address listed on our Contacts page. We also maintain email lists for application developers, schema modelers, and other folks interested in working on Freebase.com content. You can check these out and sign up at lists.freebase.com.

Of course. Check out our jobs page .