My colleagues and I were just at the AAAI Social Information Processing workshop last week, learning about some of the latest research in how groups of people organize themselves on the Web. Seeing the efforts folks were working on made clear to me that we haven’t been communicating how useful Freebase could be to researchers in general. Freebase has always been a publicly available, free database since its initial release, but over the past few months, enhancements and new features in Freebase have made it increasingly valuable as a resource for academic, personal, and commercial researchers. Some of the research related tools and services that Freebase has to offer include:
- Wholesale data dumps, beginning with Whole Graph Dumps and Wikipedia Extracts,
- A Sandbox Graph for experimental writes,
- Open source Freebase Client Code in python,
- A highly improved MQL Query Editor/Execution Environment, and
- Sets of science related data (e.g. 38,000 genes, 82,000 organism classifications, 1600 stars, 2500 chemical compounds, 2500 drugs, 4300 medical conditions, and 430,000 locations).
So what kind of research is Freebase good for?
There are many different areas to explore and questions to be answered for which selections of bulk data from Freebase may help. Examples include computer science to linguistics, as well as any domain-specific fields (e.g. genetics, astronomy, chemistry) that have instrinsically intereconnected data. If you are a computer scientist, you may find the whole graph dumps useful in areas such as data mining, machine learning, or network/graph analysis. If you are a linguist, you may get great use from the cleaned, organized extractions from the English Wikipedia. Questions or projects you may want to tackle could be things like:
- Creation of a music or movie recommendation engine
- Exploration of the network of influence of venture capitalists
- Investigation of the human genome
- Discovery of correlations between location and types of industry that propser.
Please feel free to take advantage of the resources that Freebase has to offer. For more information about using Freebase as a tool for research check out research.freebase.com.
