It’s been a while since we highlighted new features on the Freebase.com website, so I thought I’d show off a few of them now to bring you up to speed.
A while back, we split each of our Topic pages into two views: the “browse” view for people who are just interested in learning about a topic, and the “edit” view for Freebase contributors and data geeks. The “browse” view is where we’ve made a lot of improvements lately, so let’s look at a few of them.
The summary box appears at the top of each page, with the most important facts about a topic.
Summary box for New Orleans
We’ve been working on techniques to make sure that the most interesting facts bubble up into this summary, as well as making them more accessible. For instance, you’ll notice that all measurements are now provided in both metric and imperial/US measures.
Also in the summary box — and new this week — is an “embed” link that leads to our TopicBlocks configurator, and lets you embed a summary of any topic in your blog or website.
Below the summary box are the finer details about the topic. For New Orleans, a location, you can see something like this:
New Orleans location details
We’ve made the information more graphical: the population is displayed as a chart (in this case, note the drop-off in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina), and neighbourhoods are displayed as a graphical “carousel”, making the page more visually appealling.
Another thing you might notice on the topic page is sequences and series. These show off adjacent topics along the time dimension, such as “previous” and “next” for things like TV episodes or US presidents:
Series: US Presidents
… or dated sequences for things like Summer Olympic Games or winners of the Nobel Peace Prize:
Sequence: Nobel Peace Prize winners
Clicking through to “View entire collection” on any detail on the topic page, you can see our newest kind of view, the Summary view:
Summary view of New Orleans neighbourhoods
This might look familiar to you — it’s a view that shows summary boxes (as described above) for all the topics at once. Since this overlaps somewhat with what the “Gallery” view used to provide, we’ve modified the Gallery to be more purely graphical, and limited the options there to the size of picture to show, and whether or not to include a name label. Any other properties can be shown in the summary view.
If you’re starting to notice a pattern with all these summary boxes, then you might not be surprised to hear that we’ve abstracted this functionality and have some cool stuff about to be announced in relation to that. Stay tuned!
