The query editor is a tool we provide to help you write MQL queries against Freebase’s data, and see the results. David Huynh’s been working on some major improvements, known as Query Editor 2.0, and it’s now live on our site for you to play with. Soon, our old query editor will disappear and be replaced with this, but for the meantime both are available.
Some of the new features include:
- Syntax tolerance — if you leave quotes off, or forget a comma, it’ll deal. You can also ask the editor to clean up your syntax for you.
- Query assistance — hit “tab” to open out a list of possible topic IDs, properties, types, etc. Now you don’t need to have a second browser tab open to explore schema!
- Interactive results pane — lets you move around the result set more easily
- Turn queries inside out — change “authors and their books” to “books and their authors”, automatically.
- Automatically generate Acre templates to display your query results
- Variables inside queries, so you can refer to something repeatedly throughout your query and then only have to change it in one place
- Set query envelope headers via a simple form
- See how expensive your query is, and why
- Better organised examples
You can read more about these features on the about page or take a look at this screencast for a demo:
Freebase Query Editor 2.0 from David Huynh on Vimeo.
