Hack Day is less than two days away, and I thought it might be a good time to post a reminder of just how many things we have to hack on. If you’re planning on attending, you might like to check through this list and do some background reading as homework before Saturday.
Build a base
Bases let you build a homepage on Freebase for a specific subject you care about. You can create compelling views of Freebase’s existing data, load your own, or build a community to crowdsource it. Bases are also a great way to segment data you’d like to use in a specific application. See our recent blog post, All about bases, for more information.
Load data
Mike Shwe, one of our data team, has promised me he’ll be running an unconference session about how to load data into Freebase en masse. He’ll cover the techniques used for preparing and loading data into Freebase. If you’ve got a data set you’d like to load into Freebase, now is the time to clean it up and make sure you’ve got it in a usable form for Saturday.
Learn MQL
MQL is the Metaweb Query Language, used to read and write structured data in Freebase. It’s at the heart of all Freebase apps. We’ve just updated our MQL reference manual, if you’d like to read up on the syntax, and I’m pretty sure there’ll be a MQL Tutorial session at Hack Day.
REST API
Freebase’s RESTful API is the most flexible way to build Freebase apps of all kinds, whether reading, writing, or searching Freebase data. Check out our API reference. There are also a range of resources for API developers on the Make page.
Play with Acre
Acre’s our new hosted development environment. It uses server-side Javascript and has an API and templating engine for your mashup-building pleasure. You can take a look at freebaseapps.com for more information, or stay tuned for a forthcoming blog post.
Work with our data dumps
The Freebase data dumps are available at download.freebase.com. We provide three different dumps in all: a type-by-type TSV export, a link export, and WEX, a Wikipedia extract that provides a partially pre-digested, structured view of Wikipedia’s dumps. Kurt’s going to run a session on data mining with the dumps at Hack Day, and I hear tell there might be an EC2 Hadoop cluster for people to use.
Explore our RDF exports
If you’re a semantic web type, you’ll already have heard about our new Freebase RDF service. Hack Day would be a great opportunity to exploring Freebase’s contribution to the world of Linked Open Data.
And more…
Hack Day will also feature a developer preview of a new geosearch service, discussion of data modeling best practices, lots of people talking about visualisations, integrating Freebase with OpenSocial, iPhone hacking, and more. See you there!
