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Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

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Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#11

Post by walterbell »

fidotron wrote: post #5

This is a big shame. Freebase was by far the most consistent of the open data graphs. With my cynic hat on I think they're being forced by larger strategy. The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor, and I suspect the Knowledge Graph API will be somewhat more restrictive in what you're allowed to do with it. The thing is the more you get into this stuff the more you envy Facebook'…

> Facebook's position where people give them structured data on a plate.

Do they get any structured data other than user profiles?

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#12

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

walterbell wrote: post #11
fidotron wrote: post #5

This is a big shame. Freebase was by far the most consistent of the open data graphs. With my cynic hat on I think they're being forced by larger strategy. The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor, and I suspect the Knowledge Graph API will be somewhat more restrictive in what you're allowed to do with it. The thing is the more you get into this stuff the more you envy Facebook'…

> Facebook's position where people give them structured data on a plate. Do they get any structured data other than user profiles?

Yes: Various types of pages which cover virtually anything.

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#15

Post by emw »

Wikidatan here. Here's a quick comparison of Freebase and Wikidata:

Topics / items:

- Freebase: 46,476,860 [1]

- Wikidata: 12,921,731 [2]

Facts / claims:

- Freebase: 2,696,141,481 [1]

- Wikidata: 50,457,200 as of 2014-11-10 [3]

Instances of person / human:

- Freebase: 3,391,533 [4]

- Wikidata: 2,638,614 [5]

License for data

- Freebase: CC-BY [6]

- Wikidata: CC0 [7]

Data on Paul Graham:

- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/017cm9

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92650

Data on San Francisco:

- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/0d6lp

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62

Data on Python:

- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/05z1_

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28865

Data on APOE / Apolipoprotein E:

- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/0byv2v

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q14890468 (APOE), https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q424728 (Apolipoprotein E)

See [8] and [9] for an introduction to Wikidata. I have no notable experience with Freebase, but I've been contributing to Wikidata for about 2 years and would be happy to answer any questions I can.

[1] http://www.freebase.com/

[2] https://www.wikidata.org

[3] http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php

[4] http://www.freebase.com/people/person?instances

[5] http://tools.wmflabs.org/autolist /autolist1.html?q=claim[31:5]

[6] http://www.freebase.com/policies/tos

[7] See bottom of [2]

[8] Up and running with Wikidata: http://www.slideshare.net/_emw/up-and-running-with-wikidata

[9] Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web: http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#16

Post by sled »

magicalist wrote: post #7
fidotron wrote: post #5

This is a big shame. Freebase was by far the most consistent of the open data graphs. With my cynic hat on I think they're being forced by larger strategy. The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor, and I suspect the Knowledge Graph API will be somewhat more restrictive in what you're allowed to do with it. The thing is the more you get into this stuff the more you envy Facebook'…

> The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor from the article: > The last Freebase data dump will remain available and even if it wasn't, I'm sure archive.org will grab a copy (if they haven't already).

Part of the value was that the dumps were updated weekly.

Say you're using it to get a list of named entities (proper nouns). The purpose is to cluster news stories about a given entity (if you look at Facebook's Trending News, each headline begins with a proper noun followed by a blurb. Not sure if they use Freebase, but it could be a useful input).

The value of Freebase will decline over time as the content becomes out of date.

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#17

Post by walterbell »

emw wrote: post #15

Wikidatan here. Here's a quick comparison of Freebase and Wikidata: Topics / items: - Freebase: 46,476,860 [1] - Wikidata: 12,921,731 [2] Facts / claims: - Freebase: 2,696,141,481 [1] - Wikidata: 50,457,200 as of 2014-11-10 [3] Instances of person / human: - Freebase: 3,391,533 [4] - Wikidata: 2,638,614 [5] License for data - Freebase: CC-BY [6] - Wikidata: CC0 [7] Data on Paul Graham: - Freebase: http://www.freebase…

Will CC0 and CC-BY data remain separate, or will there be an attempt to reconcile future contributions?

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#18

Post by emw »

walterbell wrote: post #17
emw wrote: post #15

Wikidatan here. Here's a quick comparison of Freebase and Wikidata: Topics / items: - Freebase: 46,476,860 [1] - Wikidata: 12,921,731 [2] Facts / claims: - Freebase: 2,696,141,481 [1] - Wikidata: 50,457,200 as of 2014-11-10 [3] Instances of person / human: - Freebase: 3,391,533 [4] - Wikidata: 2,638,614 [5] License for data - Freebase: CC-BY [6] - Wikidata: CC0 [7] Data on Paul Graham: - Freebase: http://www.freebase…

Will CC0 and CC-BY data remain separate, or will there be an attempt to reconcile future contributions?

There will be an attempt to reconcile future contributions.

From Denny Vrandecic, current Google researcher working on the Google Knowledge Graph, former project director of Wikidata [1]:

"Freebase has seen a huge amount of effort go into it since it went public in 2007. It makes a lot of sense to make the results of this work available to Wikidata. But knowing Wikidata and its community a bit, it is obvious that we can not and should not simply upload Freebase data to Wikidata: Wikidata would prefer the data to be referenced to external, primary sources.

"In order to do so, Google will soon start to work on an Open Source tool which will run on Wikimedia labs and which will allow Wikidata contributors to find references for a statement and then upload the statement and the reference to Wikidata. We will release several sets of Freebase data ready for consumption by this tool under a CC0 license. This tool should also work for statements already in Wikidata without sufficient references, or for other datasets, like DBpedia and other machine extraction efforts, etc.

"To make sure we get it right, we invite you to participate in the design and development of this tool here:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Primary_sources_tool "

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2014-Decemb...

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#19

Post by emw »

sled wrote: post #16
magicalist wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor from the article: > The last Freebase data dump will remain available and even if it wasn't, I'm sure archive.org will grab a copy (if they haven't already).

Part of the value was that the dumps were updated weekly. Say you're using it to get a list of named entities (proper nouns). The purpose is to cluster news stories about a given entity (if you look at Facebook's Trending News, each headline begins with a proper noun followed by a blurb. Not sure if they use Freebase, but it could be a useful input). The value of Freebase will decline over time as the content becomes…

The Wikidata dumps are also updated weekly; see [1].

Wikidata RDF exports are made every two months or so from those dumps and are available at [2]. I imagine that frequency will pick up. You can generate your own RDF exports using the Wikidata Toolkit [3, 4].

[1] http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/wikidata/

[2] http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-exports/rdf/

[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Toolkit

[4] https://github.com/Wikidata/Wikidata-Toolkit

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