Just a heads-up for those who aren’t on the freebase-discuss mailing list. These two libraries were both announced on the list on Friday.

First up, R. Morgan announced announced a beta release of phpFreebase library.

I just wanted to inform the group that a beta release ver.: 0.6.0 of phpFreebase has been released and the project is now hosted on SourceForge.net at: http://phpfreebase.sourceforge.net

The library will currently allow querying of the Freebase system. I will soon be adding write operations and cleaning up the code. This is the first release of the php class library code so many changes may be made between this and the first release version 1.0.0.

Shawn Simister also posted his Java API and power tools:

The Java API currently supports reads and writes through the Freebase API. MQL queries can be loaded from files and parameterized for both read and writes. Cursors are also supported but error handling still needs some work.

The Power Tools project contains a collection of cross-platform, command-line tools that I’ve built to help me work with large data sets. Most notably, it includes my spreadsheet loader which allows you to map spreadsheet columns to MQL parameters and upload complex data sets.

More information about libraries and tools for various languages can be found on the Freebase documentation wiki.

Another set of slides from a recent SF Freebase meetup. Back in December, Alec presented his work on an Objective C Freebase library and an iPhone app to help people add pictures to Freebase topics that are located near them.

Here’s the slide deck from Alec’s talk:

You can also check out the Objective C Freebase library at Google Code. The iPhone app itself is, I believe, forthcoming.

Also, a reminder that meetups are held on the second Wednesday of each month at Freebase HQ in San Francisco. Join our meetup group.

Last night Will Moffat gave a talk at the San Francisco Javascript meetup on the topic of Acre, Freebase’s server-side javascript platform. He’s just posted his slides, so here they are:

Meetup in San Francisco next Wednesday

A reminder that we have a meetup happening in San Francisco next Wednesday, December 9th, at Freebase HQ. We have three talks lined up:

1. Alec Flett will talk about an iPhone app using Freebase’s geodata to encourage photo contributions
2. Arthur van Hoff will demo the Ellerdale Project, a new website mashing up Freebase with realtime data streams
3. I’ll talk about guessing people’s gender based on Freebase’s data about given names

Details at meetup.com — please RSVP there!

Community meeting next Monday

Next Monday is the first one of the month so our regular internal Monday community meeting will be open to all via Skype.

When: 2:30pm PST (GMT-8), Monday December 7th

Where: Metaweb, 631 Howard St, 4th floor, San Francisco

RSVP: Please email kirrily@metaweb.com before 2pm Monday if you plan to attend corporeally or digitally (and provide your Skype username in the latter case).

More details at Community meeting via Skype on our wiki, or see the agenda.

NY workshop is full

Our full-day workshop in New York has filled up quickly, and we have no more open slots for general signup. However, if we get any dropouts we’ll be sure to let you know! If you’d like to be put on a waiting list, please email Robert.

Pop open the Champagne!

Freebase has passed a notable milestone.  On Sunday, at about 11:00am PST, we zoomed by our 10 millionth topic — and by the time you read this post, we should surpass the 11 million topic mark.  A year ago, Freebase stood at just over 4 million topics.  That’s an annual growth rate of over 100%.

A great deal went into achieving this milestone — contributions from prolific community members like tfmorris, pak21 and sprocketonline (see our contribution leaderboard for more); new Data Team tools like the recon service, RABJ, and the spreadsheet loader; and continued growth in traditional data sources like Wikipedia.  But the largest segment of growth came from our continuing efforts to build a comprehensive repository of high-quality information about media in all its forms — especially music, movies, TV and books.

In October, we rounded out our TV domain by synchronizing with the excellent user-curated TV fan site TVRage.com.  Combined with earlier data loads from thetvdb.com, we now have comprehensive coverage of nearly every TV show and episode created in the United States.  It includes cast and credits, as well as links to key TV websites like tvguide.com and Hulu — nearly a million topics in all!

But the load that took us over the 10 million mark was the final load of editions from Open Library.  Compromising 650,000 authors, almost 2 million books and 2.1 million book editions,   this load pushed new boundaries in our data acquisition, curation, reconciliation and QA processes.

In the months ahead, we’ll be continuing to both curate and extend our media data loads with more high-quality data sets.  We plan on continuing to reconcile authors and books already in Freebase, as well as loading more books from curated bibliographic catalogs.  We’ll also be fleshing out our data about movies with data from Netflix, as well as restarting our regular synchronizations with MusicBrainz and their Next Generation Schema.

Congratulations to everyone who helped get us to this point.  It’s been an exciting year — with more great data to come!