Pop open the Champagne!

Freebase has passed a notable milestone.  On Sunday, at about 11:00am PST, we zoomed by our 10 millionth topic — and by the time you read this post, we should surpass the 11 million topic mark.  A year ago, Freebase stood at just over 4 million topics.  That’s an annual growth rate of over 100%.

A great deal went into achieving this milestone — contributions from prolific community members like tfmorris, pak21 and sprocketonline (see our contribution leaderboard for more); new Data Team tools like the recon service, RABJ, and the spreadsheet loader; and continued growth in traditional data sources like Wikipedia.  But the largest segment of growth came from our continuing efforts to build a comprehensive repository of high-quality information about media in all its forms — especially music, movies, TV and books.

In October, we rounded out our TV domain by synchronizing with the excellent user-curated TV fan site TVRage.com.  Combined with earlier data loads from thetvdb.com, we now have comprehensive coverage of nearly every TV show and episode created in the United States.  It includes cast and credits, as well as links to key TV websites like tvguide.com and Hulu — nearly a million topics in all!

But the load that took us over the 10 million mark was the final load of editions from Open Library.  Compromising 650,000 authors, almost 2 million books and 2.1 million book editions,   this load pushed new boundaries in our data acquisition, curation, reconciliation and QA processes.

In the months ahead, we’ll be continuing to both curate and extend our media data loads with more high-quality data sets.  We plan on continuing to reconcile authors and books already in Freebase, as well as loading more books from curated bibliographic catalogs.  We’ll also be fleshing out our data about movies with data from Netflix, as well as restarting our regular synchronizations with MusicBrainz and their Next Generation Schema.

Congratulations to everyone who helped get us to this point.  It’s been an exciting year — with more great data to come!