The Freebase Commons are the broad areas of knowledge that are shared throughout Freebase. You can see a list of them on the left hand side of our Explore page.

Some of the Commons domains were small and sparsely populated. We’ve recently undertaken to merge those small, sparse commons (commonses?) into larger, more active ones.

The changes include:

• Finance and Venture Capital are now part of the Business Commons
• Comic Books and Comic Strips have been merged together as Comics
• Dining, Distilled Spirits and Wine have been moved into the Food Commons
• Metropolitan Transit has been moved into the Transportation Commons
• Chess has been moved into the Games Commons

Note that in all cases, keys have been left behind so that existing applications will continue to work.