Some time ago, we introduced the idea of Machine IDs (MIDs) to Freebase. MIDs are short identifiers that have a number of advantages over the GUIDs that we had been using for years. Most importantly, they are more stable, and better for storing offline (outside of Freebase itself).

We’ve been encouraging developers to use MIDs for some time now, but our own data dumps had not kept up with the times. The good news is, as of Friday October 13th (just over six weeks from now) our data dumps will start using MIDs instead of GUIDs. This will apply to all formats of our dumps — the TSV, link export, and simple topic formats. The not-so-good news is, if you are using our data dumps you may need to modify your code to deal with it. However, we believe that the benefits of MIDs will outweigh the disadvantages of this change.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know, by commenting here or on the freebase-discuss mailing list.