• Map of city bases
• Timeline of historical bases

Location bases and historical bases are two of the most popular kinds in Freebase. If you’re interested in creating one of your own, visit our make a base page.

Tom’s created some interesting views including:

• Map of all historic sites
• Pre-1800 sites
• National recreation areas
• Places of worship and ships which are registered historic sites

If you’d like to help gather more data on these historic sites, or add new views and visualisations, join the base.

Saved views include:

• WW2 films
• Events of WW2
• Countries involved in WW2

Sprocket’s also seeking help populating some missing data, such as events without dates or locations. If you’re interested in military history, please join his base and help out!

Meanwhile, here are the slides from the talk I gave on the day, explaining what Freebase is, what bases are, and how to build one:

I hope they’re intelligible without me speaking alongside them; please let me know if you have any questions or would like more information!

If you’re already on the list, you’ll receive an email shortly with some more information. Please, if you can’t make it, let us know so we can offer your space to someone on our waiting list!

For those who aren’t near San Francisco but would still like to learn about building bases, we’re hoping to be able to provide the class materials afterwards. Meanwhile, take a look at Building Bases in our Help area.

If you’re curious about what bases are, and how they can help you gather and present information about a subject you love — from your alma mater to your favourite punk band — then you should join us next Saturday, 28th February, from 2-5pm at Freebase HQ in San Francisco.

Numbers are limited and there are only a few places left, so register here to reserve your place.

From the Freebase website:

A base is a new type of website that anyone can build using the free, open data in Freebase. It is a place to organize and share collections of information about a particular subject, like San Francisco, American Comedy, or The Smurfs.

Bases can encompass many things, but they all share common characteristics:

• They are structured. Unlike wikis, which focus on text articles, bases focus on structured information, like facts, figures, and lists of things. This means the information in a base is easy to sort, filter, query, mash up, and export to other applications.
• They are open. Anyone can build and contribute to a base, so the content grows and improves over time. You can start with something fun and easy, like a list of cartoon robots or dive bars in San Diego. As more people visit your base and add items of their own, the information grows. Soon the base becomes a great resource for fans, enthusiasts, and information seekers around the globe.
• They are free. Bases are free to make and free to reuse. Anyone can use the data from a base in their own website or application, as long as they provide proper attribution back to the Freebase community.

You can see some of our featured bases on the Explore page or in the posts about bases right here on our blog.

If you’d like to learn how to create an effective base, and get some hands-on help setting one up, then our “Build a Base” event is for you.

The details, in brief:

Build a Base event
Saturday February 28th, 2pm-5pm
Freebase HQ (@ Metaweb Technologies, 631 Howard St, San Francisco)

Because of the hands-on nature of this event, numbers are strictly limited and you must register to attend.

Apart from looking great (which it does) it also showcases some really interesting data, like:

• Sculpture in the Louvre
• Romanticism
• Saints depicted in artworks at the Louvre
• Movies filmed on location at the Louvre

This featured base now appears on our (logged out) homepage, as well as on the Explore page. Please join the base and save your own views of artworks, artists, and anything else Louvre-related.

Take a look at some of the saved views, like:

• Films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe
• Notable people influenced by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe quotations
• Edgar Allan Poe’s poems

I knew Poe had written The Raven, but I had no idea he’d penned so many more! Thanks, Faye!

To create a similar base, all you’d need to do is start with our Musical Artist type and filter for bands whose career started in your hometown. Further filtering by genre will give you views like Phil’s LA Punk Bands, LA Hip Hop Bands, and more.