Power your site’s information with this hidden gem, Freebase.
15 May
So, I’ve written article about Wikipedia, because it’s a great source of information. I’ve written about about APIs, because it’s way to autoscale.
What if you could combine those 2 concepts–or, even better, for your database-savvy folks, query data using SQL? After some mindful web surfing, I across quite a powerful source of data. It’s called Freebase (formerly known as Metaweb). Check out this video first.
Freebase is very comprehensive wiki of metadata, organized into “entities.” The video above explains the concept of an “entity” pretty clearly. Freebase is free for non-commercial and commercial (woohoo!) uses and can already consists over ~$20MM entities. You easily extract data from Freebase by querying using MQL or through the Freebase API.
Learn more about Freebase here. They’ve been around since 2007 and was acquired by Google in late last year.
dave