It’s that time again. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, mark your calendars for Wednesday September 17th, 6:30pm onwards, when we’ll be holding our quasi-regular Freebase user group meeting right here at Freebase HQ.
The address is 4th floor, 631 Howard St, San Francisco. Google Map.
I’m working on lining up speakers, and so far have confirmed the following:
Flip Kromer from Infochimps will come tell us about his project and talk about the world of open data.
James Levy, Freebase API developer, will talk about developing Freebase apps using Google App Engine and Freebase’s own Acre platform.
I’ll post a final/confirmed list as soon as I have one.
As usual, beer and pizza will be supplied. RSVP at upcoming.org so we can figure out numbers. Last meeting was huge, and this one’s shaping up even better, so don’t miss it!
Freebase is growing, and as we get more and more people joining us to use and contribute data we’re finding it more and more important to actively support our community.
Historically, support for Freebase has come from Metaweb employees, but that’s changing as time goes on. Many of our contributors are knowledgable experts too, and we wanted to recognise those people and help them be even more effective.
So, we created the Experts group. These people are marked as Experts in the Freebase domain. Currently they include:
Currently these experts can be identified by a gold star on their user profile page, as well as the list on the Freebase domain homepage.
So what will the experts group do?
Peer support. You may see one of these “gold star” people around in the discussions on Freebase, helping support new users or those with questions.
Keeping Freebase clean. We’re currently discussing processes for spam management and how to guide people away from contributing “junk” data.
Certain administrative tasks. We don’t really have many regular admin-only tasks, but one of them is breaking ties in the review queue. We’re hoping to get our experts to help us with this, and any other such tasks that come up.
If you’re wondering how our experts were chosen, or how to join the programme, we’re looking for people who have been active, regular contributors to Freebase for some time, and we’re aiming for a mix of skills and interests. The user profiles and histories of the current experts should give you some idea of what we’re looking for. If you’d like to nominate someone (even yourself), let us know.
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and are involved in Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Wiktionary, etc, then come join us for the Wikimedia SF Meetup #7.
As heavy users of Wikipedia, we’re delighted to be able to host this event.
(As an aside, we’ve also set the date for our next Freebase user group meeting, which will be September 17th. Stay tuned for more details!)
We often get asked by application developers how to clear the cache. The problem occurs when you have an app that reads from Freebase, then you go edit some data via the Freebase.com website, and expect it to be immediately shown in the app. It won’t be, because of the cache.
To fix this, just use our API’s touch service. This resets the “mwLastWriteTime” cookie and effectively clears your cache. It’s the same thing that happens if you’re using our dev toolbar (press F8 when viewing any Freebase page) and click “Refresh cache”.
The review queue can be found in the centre of the Freebase homepage, below the newsfeed, if you’re logged in. It looks like this:
The number of review items grew to 900+ recently but is slowly starting to come down again now. Why did it grow so high? The main reason was that we were only acting on votes once a day, so things got clogged up. We’ve now increased that frequency to every hour, so your votes should get cleared and acted on much more quickly.
If you’ve got a few moments to spare, go check the queue and vote on a few topics. This is important because it’s how we resolve requests for topic deletion and merge. We really need to keep on top of them!
There are a couple of new features of note in this release:
Email invitations to domains - now you can easily invite others to join a domain you think they’d be interested in. For more, see the related blog posting
New Freebase expert group - these folks are helping support the Freebase community; you’ll recognize them by their shiny new badges! Check the new expert group here.
And now, onto the gory details…
Key
Issue Type
Summary
CLI-4475
Improvement
Invite users to a domain/catalog
CLI-5261
Improvement
shorten blurbs on topic page
CLI-4863
Improvement
show aliases on one line
CLI-4538
Improvement
Client should be able to handle url-encoded URIs to create web links from NY Times keys
CLI-5175
Improvement
Add opensearch discovery
CLI-5109
Improvement
empty schema is intimidating
CLI-5178
Bug
IE7 - last line cut off in single thread view, when the thread has no replies
CLI-5230
Bug
Bullet Point and Numbering Indent Broken in Help Topics, Also Display Mixed Font Sizes
CLI-5239
Bug
saving a view with an ‘is empty’ constraint causes an error
CLI-3970
Bug
When adding a link to a discussion post, you have to remove “http://” before the save button will appear
CLI-4776
Bug
Discussion hub is broken for some accounts
CLI-4789
Bug
Schema Editor, Display, setting a standard type to enumerated that currently has more than a few hundred instances will either crash browser or time out.
CLI-4824
Bug
Homepage wording and punctuation corrections
CLI-4846
Bug
cotyping from filter table fails gracelessly on permissions problems
CLI-5000
Bug
Schema Editor: Can’t re-edit property after changing property key
CLI-5006
Bug
‘/private/autocomplete: Results have clause “/type/type/domain”, which is always null
CLI-5026
Bug
Font too light on discussion pages
CLI-5051
Bug
relative dates/overall date display is confusing in discuss
CLI-5116
Bug
Topic Still Appearing in Navigation After Parent Topic Property Deleted
CLI-5130
Bug
Schema editor is calling autocomplete with category=expected_type instead of category=included_type
CLI-5157
Bug
Image always included in saved view, even if I don’t want it
CLI-5158
Bug
Creation date doesn’t show in saved view
CLI-5159
Bug
Cotyping from filter page ignoring ‘is empty’ filters
CLI-5164
Bug
IE7: List importer CSS is messed up.
CLI-5165
Bug
Description edit buttons are on wrong side, no progress bar in IE
CLI-5167
Bug
Styling for saved views doesn’t take on domain appearance/colours
CLI-5171
Bug
Can’t enter deep property values from the type view page
CLI-5182
Bug
Assertion error when invoking more columns options (adding columns to a filter view of Film Director)
CLI-5204
Bug
Line wrapping in news feed is awkward
CLI-5209
Bug
News feed: bad formatting of new member announcement
CLI-5277
Bug
Discuss - threads shouldn’t have watch buttons
CLI-4523
Bug
Advanced filter view: shouldn’t show ID and Name
CLI-4689
Bug
The topic for “Erbium” is not working
CLI-4872
Bug
Clear error message in query editor before running query
CLI-4947
Bug
Cookie crumbs probably not necessary in base
CLI-5033
Bug
Should be able to hit “enter” to accept selection when delegating property in schema editor
CLI-5079
Bug
Help not available on edit image gallery, icon “?” appears to be a dead link
CLI-5092
Bug
Safari: /user/profile has text that is too small in font size and the username is placed too high (badges appear in subscript positon)
CLI-5119
Bug
Unable to change text for a just added image file (added throught the edit image gallery interface)
CLI-5121
Bug
Cross posting should either toggle on or off with clicking on the suggested ;inks above the ‘Other’ entry field (fails with slient mql write failure)
CLI-5143
Bug
mqlread button should be disabled when no read has been done
CLI-5177
Bug
“Search the __ Domain” - Should a domain name be listed?
With the newest release, we’ve introduced a nifty new feature that allows you to more easily invite people to a domain. Let’s say you’ve got a friend who’s fascinated by wine and you think he or she might be interested in viewing or contributing to the data in Freebase
If you’re logged in and visit a domain homepage you’ll now see a link to ‘Invite Others’
Clicking on it will bring up an email form where you can add an email address (or multiple addresses — up to 10 separated by commas) and customize the message to send.
The people you’ve selected will shortly receive an email sent by you from Freebase. If they’re already a registered Freebase user and are logged in, they can easily click ‘join domain’ to add themselves as members. If they aren’t yet Freebase users, the system will take them through the registration process and ultimately will add them as members once it is complete.
Explore the domains in Freebase and see if there are any you think your friends or colleagues might be interested in.
O’Reilly have posted a video of Jonathan Lowe’s Where2.0 presentation on blip.tv. For your viewing pleasure, here it is!
Jonathan will be presenting the same material plus “about 45 more minutes worth on collaboration, structured data, etc.” to the British Computing Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group on September 8th, so if you’re in the area, go check it out.
Now lets take a real sidestep and pull up a list of sports teams who use a former Olympic facility as a venue. This is the sort of question that you could figure out on your own, but it would be a pain in the neck to do by hand.
And here’s the resulting data set:
Spellbound also suggests some other interesting data sets to explore, like “people who went to schools that have birds as mascots”.