A while back, we split each of our Topic pages into two views: the “browse” view for people who are just interested in learning about a topic, and the “edit” view for Freebase contributors and data geeks. The “browse” view is where we’ve made a lot of improvements lately, so let’s look at a few of them.

The summary box appears at the top of each page, with the most important facts about a topic.

Summary box for New Orleans

We’ve been working on techniques to make sure that the most interesting facts bubble up into this summary, as well as making them more accessible. For instance, you’ll notice that all measurements are now provided in both metric and imperial/US measures.

Also in the summary box — and new this week — is an “embed” link that leads to our TopicBlocks configurator, and lets you embed a summary of any topic in your blog or website.

Below the summary box are the finer details about the topic. For New Orleans, a location, you can see something like this:

New Orleans location details

We’ve made the information more graphical: the population is displayed as a chart (in this case, note the drop-off in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina), and neighbourhoods are displayed as a graphical “carousel”, making the page more visually appealling.

Another thing you might notice on the topic page is sequences and series. These show off adjacent topics along the time dimension, such as “previous” and “next” for things like TV episodes or US presidents:

Series: US Presidents

… or dated sequences for things like Summer Olympic Games or winners of the Nobel Peace Prize:

Sequence: Nobel Peace Prize winners

Clicking through to “View entire collection” on any detail on the topic page, you can see our newest kind of view, the Summary view:

Summary view of New Orleans neighbourhoods

This might look familiar to you — it’s a view that shows summary boxes (as described above) for all the topics at once. Since this overlaps somewhat with what the “Gallery” view used to provide, we’ve modified the Gallery to be more purely graphical, and limited the options there to the size of picture to show, and whether or not to include a name label. Any other properties can be shown in the summary view.

If you’re starting to notice a pattern with all these summary boxes, then you might not be surprised to hear that we’ve abstracted this functionality and have some cool stuff about to be announced in relation to that. Stay tuned!

On the left, we’re highlighting a handful of popular and trending topics, to showcase relevant information in Freebase. On the right, the week’s top users are also automatically generated, so if you are a regular contributor to Freebase you’ll probably see your user pic appear on our homepage from time to time.

In the middle of the page you’ll see some links to case studies about how site owners can integrate Freebase in their sites. Take a look at how Wall Street Journal, Bing, and Zemanta use Freebase data.

Also in this release, we’ve added an easy attribution wizard to make it easy for you to attribute Freebase when you use our data under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. We know it’s hard to read through reams of licensing policy, so hopefully this will make life a lot easier for anyone who wants to link back to us!

There’s more still to come, so watch for further improvements to our site over the next few weeks.

We’ve struggled for some time with how to present useful information to casual visitors to our website, as well as providing a powerful editing interface for logged-in contributors. With this release, we’re splitting the topic page into separate “viewing” and “editing” pages.

The “viewing” page, which is the first thing you’d see if you came in via a Google search, for instance, presents important information in a fact box at the top of the page:

It also calls out important facts, like the albums a musical artist has recorded, in a more graphical, visually appealling way:

Going forward, we will be customising certain common types of topic pages so they look even better.

If you want to edit the information on the page, you can hit the “Add more facts” button on the right hand side of the page.

The “editing” page is much the same as our old topic page, with a few benefits for the Freebase geek crowd. The main one in this release is that we’re showing you all the keys for the topic right on the page, so you don’t have to go to the Explore view to find them. More contributor- and developer-friendly features will be added in future releases.

Note that once you’re on the “editing” page, when you click from topic to topic you’ll stay in edit mode. You need to click the “Back to Browse” button (top right) to return to the “viewing” page. Searches and saved views will also take you to the “viewing” page. We’re working on optimising this flow, and would appreciate any feedback you have.

Other changes in this release

You probably already heard (because we emailed everyone about this change to our service) that we’re now sending email notifications in response to certain events occuring on Freebase, such as discussion posts. Well, this release we’ve added notifications if someone’s following you.

Another change is that we’re limiting the use of base subdomains like basename.freebase.com to the base homepage. Pages within bases will use canonical names like http://www.freebase.com/base/basename/... This is because it confuses search engines when there are two pages with the same name. The subdomain names will continue to redirect to the canonical ones, and your base homepage’s name does not change at all, so this should be a low impact change for base owners.

• 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.

If you’re logged in to Freebase and visit a topic page that has no types (other than /common/topic), you may be asked a question like this one. This feature uses the same backend as our Typewriter game, and the guesses at types are sourced from Wikipedia’s categories.

That was the only significant, user-visible change to our website this week, but you if you’re interested in other bugfixes and the like, you can see the full list of changes in Jira.

This week’s changes on Freebase.com:

• We’ve removed the “suggested views” sidebar from the “All views” page within a base. This is part of a larger effort to do away with the often-confusing “base topic” type. The suggested views feature was very little used, so hopefully this won’t cause any difficulty.
• We have some minor UI improvements in our discussion forums. The posting interface has moved up the page to make it easier to get to, and we’ve done away with some unnecessary complexity for filtering cross-posted discussions.
• This actually rolled out the week before, but you may have noticed that we have an improved topic history page. See history of David Ogden Stiers for example.

There were also a handful of bugfixes and the like. If you’re interested in the minutiae, bugs.freebase.com has all the details.

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!

So, on to what’s new.

The biggest thing, from my perspective at least, is the return of the Discuss hub. This got dropped from our top-level navigation when we redesigned the site back in November, but is now reinstated as part of Help. There are two broad-ranging discussion forums, General support and Developer support, where you can ask for help on any Freebase-related topic.

You can also see all discussions across Freebase, if you’re interested in keeping up with recent happenings on the various bases, commons, and even topic pages. We’re hoping to add an RSS feed for this shortly.

Other points of interest in this release:

• Base newsfeeds go back further. We were finding that if a base hadn’t been updated in a few days, the newsfeed on the right would be empty and say “No recent activity”. That’s strictly true, I guess, but not helpful. Now, at least, it will show whatever the most recent activity was — even if it was quite a long time ago.
• Badges for staff and experts. Now, wherever you see a Freebase staff member or one of our experts posting to discussions, making changes to topics, or whatever else, they’ll always appear with a little badge saying “Staff” or “Expert” over their userpic.

Those are most of the changes you’re likely to notice, but if you want all the gory detail, Jira has it.