TopicBlocks let you add facts, pictures, and descriptions, and related topics to your webpage or blog post, and works for any of Freebase’s 8.4 million topics.

This is what a TopicBlock looks like:

GoldenEye

GoldenEye (1995) is the seventeenth spy film in the James Bond series, and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional MI6 agent…

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Initial release dateNov 17, 1995

TaglineYou know the name. You know the number.,No limits. No fears. No substitutes., more

Directed byMartin Campbell

RatedPG-13 (USA)

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You don’t need to install any plugins or custom tools — you can just cut and paste HTML wherever you want it to embed a Topic Block. You can also customise the layout to suit your own preferences:

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso (born Lhamo Döndrub) (Tibetan: ལྷ་མོ་དོན་འགྲུབ་; Wylie: Lha-mo Don-’grub; Chinese:…

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Date of birthJul 6, 1935

Country of nationalityTibet

ProfessionWriterPhilosopher

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American Revolution

The American Revolution is the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen of Britain’s colonies in…

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Start date1775

End date1783

Related Topics

Gulf War

Vietnam War

Bosnian War

Elsewhere on the Web

Find books about american revolution

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Try it out and let us know what you think!

One of the interesting pieces of the Freebase dataset that not many people know about is the fact that when we harvest or link data from various sources, we retain their original identifiers and also the uri_templates that we can use to remap those local identifiers back to worldwide web identifiers.

Since this is a very useful feature, I’ve spent a little time to make this information easier to use and create an Acre app that is capable of taking either a freebase id and return all the equivalent URIs for that concept or get a URI and try to find all the equivalent URIs.

NOTE: The service is powered by both Freebase and SameAs

It also offers a JSONP service so that you can access it from your own web pages if you need to do so.

Find it at: http://ids.freebaseapps.com/

Their latest feature, Visual Search Galleries, takes structured browsing even further, providing a slick visual interface for slicing and dicing a collection of search results – like Digital Cameras, Dog Breeds, or Movies in Theaters. We’re excited to see that Freebase is helping to power this feature as well.

If you go to the Visual Search homepage and click on the Dog Breeds gallery, you’ll see a nice visual display of 161 popular dog breeds:

You can scroll through it, hover over an image to get more information about that breed, or use the filters on the left to narrow your search based on attributes like Size or Exercise Needs. As the attribution notice in the lower right shows, this data is being pulled straight from Freebase.

It’s great to see Freebase being used to help power search in deeper and more interesting ways!

Philip’s email explains what you’re seeing:

* Nodes represent types, edges represent properties.
* Reverse properties are shown in parentheses after the master property name.
* Grey edges represent hidden properties
* Blue nodes are types outside the domain being viewed, but which are linked to from the domain (the edge will be dashed if the master property is from the type outside the domain to that inside the domain)
* Red nodes represent undocumented types
* Node shapes indicate the display style of the type (ellipse: standard, rectangle: CVT, triangle: enumeration)
* All nodes are clickable to view that type

The visualisations are now built into the schema explorer.

As with all other Acre apps, the source code is available and cloneable.

Brian Karlak looked into it and told me:

We have ~600K people in Freebase with both names and genders.

I took the first name as the first space-separated token in the /type/object/name of these people. Dreadfully simplistic, I know, but it will do for this analysis. It does mean that “first names” will include such honorifics as “King”, “Princess” and “Dr.”, but that’s OK — some correlate very well with gender.

I looked for first names with at least 100 exemplars. Of those, there were 693 first names that correlated >99% with a particular gender. There were 507 that showed 100% correlation with a particular gender. Over 80% (412) of these were male names.

There were 127 first names that had at least 100 exemplars but did not correlate consistently with a single gender. The most gender-ambiguous name was Andrea (nearly 50/50 split), followed by Ashley (48/52), Dana (53/47), Nicola (47/53), and Charlie (47/53).

Brian tells me we’ll be able to use this to assert the genders of people in Freebase, so you don’t have to.

If you’re interested in gendered names in Freebase, I recently created an app to do more or less what Brian is doing above. It’s called Gendered Names and if you tell it a given name, it will tell you the split between male and female based on what’s in Freebase and present it as a nice chart. Here’s what it thinks about the name “Evelyn” for example:

Of course, as with any Acre app, you can view the source and clone it if you’d like to build something similar.

Some other interesting tools that are part of the acre-development app include:

• Most-cloned files
• Published apps without a description (are any of yours on there?)
• An RSS feed for the newest apps by creation date.

As usual, the source code for the app is there for you to read or clone.

This is largely thanks to two big loads from the data team: first up, a massive import of millions of books and related information from the Open Library Project, and secondly a big load of around 255k TV episodes from TVRage.

Here’s a chart showing topic growth in Freebase since the beginning of April:

Topic growth in Freebase, April to August 2009

To take a look at the relevant data, visit our Publishing Commons or TV Commons. For some apps taking advantage of all this data, look at Tippify for book recommendations, or Alex’s TV4Me app (currently in development), a mashup of Freebase’s TV data with US broadcast schedules.

When you add Balloons to your blog post or article, Zemanta will scan the text, looking for important keywords that correspond to topics in Freebase. When it finds them, it will add a link and a small icon that users can click on to preview the content, and to view more information about that topic from Freebase.

For example, if you were writing about recent political developments in Afghanistan, Zemanta might add a small icon next to the word “Afghanistan.” If a user chose to click on it, it would show a Balloon that looks like this:

Under the hood, Zemanta is tagging pages with Freebase topic IDs (e.g., Afghanistan) instead of free text (e.g., afghanistan). By doing that, they can use the Freebase API to dynamically display relevant facts and figures from Freebase. You could imagine how this same notion could be extended in all sorts of ways, as developers build new and interesting widgets capable of understanding the machine-readable Freebase tags.

As Zemanta notes in their blog post about it, the code behind Balloons is all open source, and the tags that power it use the open Common Tag format.

Nice work Zemanta! We’re excited to see where this one goes.

For certain queries, Bing augments its standard search results with an answer box full of structured data from Freebase. For example, when we wrote this blog posting, a search for “twitter” gave you the following:

Similarly, searching for “Sergey Brin” gave you this:

It works for collections too. For example, check out what we got when we searched for “pablo picasso artworks”:

Nice!

Since Bing is constantly tweaking its algorithms, we don’t know what exact set of keywords will trigger Freebase queries in the future. But we’re definitely hoping to expand the coverage over time, and also to explore other ways in which Freebase data could be used to improve search. We think there are quite a few interesting things that could be done.

Congrats to the Bing team on a great launch!

If you’re like me, MQL often feels like a combination of power and dark magic: some people can whip up a MQL query in no time, like they knew all about every type, every property and how they link all the various pieces of the graph together.

Asking around how people did it, yielded several strategies… but many basically revolved around using the ‘explore pages’ (those magically revealed by hitting the F8 key on freebase.com).

Then David wrote the new query editor, with the amazing context completion and I thought I was set… but while my MQL mojo improved a lot with it, it always felt like something was missing: if I knew the type I wanted, I could get started… but what if I didn’t know where to start? what if I didn’t know how to construct the query and I needed some guidance in navigating how the types were all connected together? (especially with CVTs and whatnot)

I felt like I was in a fog and with no map: finding my way out felt tentative at best, frustrating at worst.

The Jason showed me an acre app he had written a long time ago and that he uses all the time that offered a browsable interface to all the freebase domains, types and properties, their IDs… and how they all connect together.

I had found my map.

Unfortunately, while extremely useful already, the schema explorer app needed some love… so I decided to give it some and the result has been so successful internally that I’m happy to announce it to the public so that everybody can benefit from it. Find it at: http://schemas.freebaseapps.com/

I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do.

NOTES:

1) suggestions/criticism/feature-requests appreciated and welcome

2) this is an acre app and if you’re curious (or interested in forking it) you can find it at: http://acre.freebase.com/#app=/user/jdouglas/schemas

3) this couldn’t have been possible without Jason’s work upon which I built this so kudos go to him while all the mistakes remain mine

4) I’ve been working on integrating the schema explorer with the upcoming freebase developer’s documentation hub, so that newcomers won’t have to hunt down this URL in the mail archives to find a little guidance in the type maze.

Enjoy!