My grandfather, Richard Neutra, was an architect. His complete works span a half-century with over 300 buildings designed. In 2006, my uncle was kind enough to provide me with a list of those works along with addresses and other information of interest. I took a crash course in the Metaweb Query Language (MQL) and geocoding and learned some hard lessons about reconciling data. I imported that data into freebase using the http API.
My first “application” simply exported that data in to a Google Earth .kml formatted file. One of our interns, Zak Stein, created a general purpose architecture location browser using mjt that really shows the potential of this kind of data (http://dev.mqlx.com/~zak/arch). It was a revelation to see this data, for the first time, laid out on a map.
There are a number of architecture databases out there. A few come to mind:
- The Wikipedia – has articles on many notable buildings
- Great Buildings – affiliated with Architecture Week
- Archiplanet – a wiki, sponsored by greatbuildings.com
- Emporis – focuses on skyscrapers
- Skyscraper Page – another skyscraper database
- archINFORM – emphasis on european modern architecture
- Google Earth – various efforts to display architectural location data
So why duplicate the efforts of these various projects? I think freebase.com has a pretty unique combination of attributes:
- The data is Creative Commons licensed. It’s is a two way street: people contribute data, the world is free to re-use that data.
- Freebase has an API. You don’t like Zak’s archiPortal app? Create your own! Zak’s app uses the http API, you can too!
- Because the architecture data in freebase.com is cross-linked with many other domains of data (e.g. film, people, music) everyone benefits from the cross-linking: you can ask some interesting questions, e.g. “what buildings were designed by Austrian architects?”:
{
“query”:[{
"type":"/architecture/architect",
"/people/person/nationality":"Austria",
"name":null,
"structures_designed":[]
}]
}
click here to try this query (hint: click on the “read” button in the query editor window). Of course, we have a relatively small breadth of architecture data at this time. That’s where you can help! Pick an architect that you love, find him/her on freebase.com and enter some data. If you include an address for a building, you will have the satisfaction of seeing that building appear on the archiPortal map!
