The Freebase Blog

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.
• David Huynh will be speaking about Freebase Parallax

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:

• avh contributes mostly in music-related areas, and is also a regular on our developers mailing list.
• doconnor has created a number of domains, and has recently been contributing a lot of information about dog breeds.
• evening is a constant contributor, especially through our data mobs, and recently contributed Freebase’s 4 millionth topic.
• frankieroberto has built a domain around exhibitions and has worked to bring museum people into the Freebase community
• lukeschubert hails from Australia and, when not contributing to data mobs, can often be found filling in information on antipodean subjects.
• sandos has created domains on topics from computation to common sense and has recently been contributing information about airline accidents.
• spatialed is a regular on the data-modeling mailing list and created the motorcycles domain, however his real love is spatial data and bio-diversity.

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!)

Here’s a little Rocky Horror Picture Show clip to help you remember one of our newer API features.

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!

Related blog posts:

• The review queue and you
• The review queue: a screencast

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…

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.

David tells me he’s just put up the source code for Freebase Parallax on Google Code. Download the Freebase Parallax source here.

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.

I’m not sure what time the “new this week” counter rolls over, but I thought I’d take a moment to capture these stats from our Olympics domain:

That’s a lot of new information! Thanks to everyone who’s been plugging away at events as they occur.

Meanwhile, Spellbound has posted an interesting article about exploring Freebase’s Olympics data with Parallax:

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”.