Acre is Freebase’s new hosted app development platform. It’s been in developer preview mode for a while now, but we’re finally able to open it up to the whole world, just in time for Hack Day.
Acre lets you easily build apps based on Freebase’s structured data, using a simple Javascript templating system. We provide an IDE (the app editor) which lets you create an app then helps you organise templates, scripts, queries, and static files.
You can also browse other people’s apps, and clone either the whole app, or specific files. If you like someone’s Freebase/Google maps mashup of filming locations in Australia, but would prefer it showed ones in Africa, you could simply clone it and change a few lines. The built-in version history shows each stage in your development, including the provenance of any cloned files.
Take a look at some of the existing Acre apps:
FMDB is a simple movie browser, allowing you to search for movies, actors, and roles:
Stefano’s Freebase Translate exposes our internationalised names for topics in Freebase, and allows you to insert translations for topics that don’t yet have them.
Niall recently blogged about his work with Acre and showed how he built a simple tool to find an image for anything in Freebase, called id2image. Niall recently created a website, intothebin.com, which uses id2image as a service — showing how Acre can be used to build meta-APIs on top of Freebase.
To start building apps with Acre, visit freebaseapps.com.
