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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

#31

Post by frik »

Shank wrote: post #20

Doesn't Bing use Freebase for some search result panels? I suppose they'll just transfer over to Wikidata, but it seems funny that Google might have just added a lot of development time to some Bing developers to migrate APIs.

Microsoft bought Powerset (company) on July 1, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company)

On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.

The natural language processing part of Bing (Powerset) is based on Wikipedia data (scrapping the content), but they had a prototype based on Freebase too:

On April 16, 2008: "Powerset demonstrated our integration to Freebase. At one point, a group stood in front of the projected computer and threw out queries to see all of the different Freebase types that Powerset could handle." (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20080430113649/http://blog.power... )

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#32

Post by frik »

waldir wrote: post #29
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…

Reasonator is a better way to visualize info from Wikidata: Data on Paul Graham: - Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/017cm9 - Wikidata: https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=92650 Data on San Francisco: - Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/0d6lp - Wikidata: https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=62 Data on Python: - Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/05z1_ - Wikidata: https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q…

So sad. Freebase is way ahead and more polished.

Wikidata originates from the German Wikipedia. The idea is good, but the implementation pales in comparison to Freebase (at the moment).

This is the real San Francisco Wikidata page (slow and ugly): https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62

Reasonator takes ages to load and render the content.

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#33

Post by barakm »

markbao wrote: post #6

I'm sorry if I missed this, but what will happen to the Freebase software? I always found that to be a strong asset, but Wikidata's is less than stellar. They only mention the data and APIs here.

@markbao -- I did get Cayley out the door (http://github.com/google/cayley) which has many many parallels to Freebase's graph database, loading and storing Freebase data (as well as whatever other graph data). I've been a little busy with other bits of life at the moment, but totally open for contributions!

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#34

Post by tommorris »

TuringTest wrote: post #28
tommorris wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DBpedia is data scraped out of Wikipedia and made available as RDF, SPARQL (and JSON). The scraping process is... okay. Sometimes it is great, sometimes it is really crappy. Wikidata is intended to be the database behind Wikipedia. The current infoboxes that show you things like the population of cities—ideally, they'll be driven at some point directly from Wikidata. Then Wikidata can be a place for disparate data to…

Wikidata has a number of structural problems of its own, though, at least when it comes to interacting with the Wikipedia projects it aims to serve. The model for interlinks connecting different languages assumes a 1:1 correspondence between articles and concepts, although the Wikipedias for each language have different structures, and a given article can document several concepts. Also, I have the impression that th…

Yeah, generally the Wikidata folk are taking things quite slowly. Start slow and get simple things right. The software is evolving slowly too.

I'm quietly confident that it might all work out, but it is a bit too early to tell.

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#35

Post by alismayilov »

nicklaf wrote: post #13

Has anybody here used DBpedia? If so, how do you see it in relation to Wikidata? Do the projects overlap? Or, might they serve complementary purposes, with, say, DBpedia extracting data from Wikidata (rather than from Wikipedia drirectly)?

We are working on Wikidata to DBpedia mapping. I think we will finish next year. We had some extraction on DBpedia 2014. http://blog.dbpedia.org/2014/09/09/dbpedia-version-2014-rele...

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#36

Post by emw »

frik wrote: post #32
waldir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasonator is a better way to visualize info from Wikidata: Data on Paul Graham: - Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/017cm9 - Wikidata: https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=92650 Data on San Francisco: - Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/0d6lp - Wikidata: https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=62 Data on Python: - Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/05z1_ - Wikidata: https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q…

So sad. Freebase is way ahead and more polished. Wikidata originates from the German Wikipedia. The idea is good, but the implementation pales in comparison to Freebase (at the moment). This is the real San Francisco Wikidata page (slow and ugly): https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62 Reasonator takes ages to load and render the content.

There's a Wikidata UI Redesign in development [1] which should improve the default site's visual appeal.

That said, while the San Francisco Wikidata page may currently be uglier than its Freebase counterpart, it is not slower. webpagetest.org has the Wikidata page fully loaded at 8.8 s and the Freebase page 11.2 s [2, 3]. And while Reasonator is certainly dog slow (21.2 s to fully load! [4]), its San Francisco page is much more polished than the Freebase's.

[1] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:UI_redesign_input

[2] http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141218_DR_9W4/

[3] http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141218_ZA_9WF/

[4] http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141218_6N_9WK/

Re: Freebase is closing down; data going to WikiData

#37

Post by gbersac »

I think this decision is a proof of the maturity of the Freebase comunity.

I always heard of open source community splitting, which is fragmenting the forces working on each project and lowering the quality of each products. Doing the opposite here will lead to one great product rather than two "not bad" products competing against each others.

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