We’ve seen a bunch of people developing great new Freebase apps over the last month or so, and I thought it was time to highlight a few of them.

Powerset

You might have seen Freebase mentioned in conjunction with Powerset recently. Powerset is a semantic search engine that searches Wikipedia and Freebase.

If you search Powerset for something like What characters did Jim Henson play? you’ll see structured results that draw on Freebase data.

(If you’re interested in how Powerset uses Freebase, they’ll be presenting about it at our user group meeting on the 17th.)

Thinkbase

Christian Hirsch’s Thinkbase is a general-purpose visualiser for Freebase data.

Written in Java, it presents a paned view with Freebase on one side and a graphical representation of relationships between topics on the other. Double-click on any node to re-centre the diagram, or right click for other options.

Influence Viewer

The Influence domain is proving to be one of our most popular with app builders. The latest to use this data is Martin Dudek’s Influence Viewer.

Influence Viewer is written in ActionScript, and like Thinkbase, it provides a clickable visualisation of topics (i.e. people who influenced others) and the relationships between them.

Taught or Not, Shot or Not, PullQuotes

James Levy has been experimenting with Freebase to power games like Taught or Not (using influence data), Shot or Not (guessing how people died), and PullQuotes (identifying political speakers from their anonymised quotes).

Although James says they’re all just experimental previews, and has plans for improvements, they’re still great examples of what can be done. They’re also the first Freebase apps we know of to be built on Google’s App Engine.

For more applications written using Freebase, see the list of Freebase applications.