Comments on: Web services and MQL

By: darin

darin — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:29:15 +0000

Jeremy, you might want to take a look at William Pietri’s Query Builder (it’s one of the featured apps on Freebase). It’s still in early stages, and it’s definitely not NLP, but it greatly simplifies the process of generating a MQL query and I think is a step in the direction of making it easy for end users to ask questions of the system.

By: Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:11:08 +0000

Brendan, thanks for the clarification. I should have read between the lines a little bit better. I wonder if someone will come up with a natural language processing system that translates natural language into MQL.

By: brendan

brendan — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:21:44 +0000

I think the post was a little misleading. No, Metaweb doesn’t have plans to allow for plain english queries. The JSON formatted MQL query is *it*. One really nice thing about MQL is that it’s quite a bit closer to expressing something in human language than, say, SQL which can get pretty gnarly when you’re joining a bunch of tables in your query.

By: Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:27:48 +0000

Thanks for the responses, I am impressed by the openness and quick responses of the Metaweb team.

I understand how to programmaticly get the answer to “On which U2 album was ‘one Tree Hill’ first released?” via the API. I guess what I was really wondering was if Metaweb was going to have some standard way to translate human readable queries like “On which U2 album was ‘one Tree Hill’ first released?” to programmatic queries like {”myquery”:{”query”:{”name”:”U2″,”type”:”/music/artist”,”album”:[{”name”:null, “track”:[{”name”:”One Tree Hill”}]}]}}}. Or is it up to the developer using the API to do that?

By: daepark

daepark — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:50:05 +0000

continued…

Also, we have built a javascript templating engine to work with Freebase and just about any other web services and get around javascript’s same-origin policy. See http://mjtemplate.org/.

Once you get your hands dirty, you should consider joining our developers mailing list at http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/developers for any questions regarding developing applications using the Freebase API.

By: daepark

daepark — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:49:50 +0000

continued….

You will NOT be able to invoke an XMLHttpRequest to freebase.com if your page was served up from jeremyolson.com because of javascript’s same-origin policy. However there are numerous methods in getting around this restriction in which Mr. David Flanagan has wonderfully addressed in our documentation, “Developing Metaweb-Enabled Web Applications”. See http://www.freebase.com/view/documentation/ch04.html#id2619120.

By: daepark

daepark — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:43:13 +0000

The MQL read/write service IS the programmatic API to Freebase. To find out “On which U2 album was ‘One Tree Hill’ first released?”, try invoking the MQL read service with the following url with your browser:

http://www.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?queries={”myquery”:{”query”:{”name”:”U2″,”type”:”/music/artist”,”album”:[{"name":null, "track":[{"name":"One Tree Hill"}]}]}}}

You will get an application/json response saying that in fact “One Tree Hill” only appeard in one album named “The Joshua Tree”.

By: Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:04:37 +0000

How does the Freebase MQL service relate to the API (in which you can, at this point, use the MQL query language to query the Freebase database directly). Will I be able to use the Freebase MQL service in my web application? For example, could I query the API with a question like “On which U2 album was ‘One Tree Hill’ first released?” and it return the results to my web application? These kinds of queries would obviously not be computer generated but from the users of my web application.