Freebase

Freebase
Name	Freebase
Type	Collaborative knowledge base
Owner	Google (acquisition 2010)
Launched	2007
Discontinued	2016
Programming	RDF, MQL, JSON

Freebase Freebase was an open, collaborative knowledge graph and semantic database that aggregated structured data about notable Barack Obama, The Beatles, Paris, Microsoft, and Harvard University. It served as a resource for entities such as Albert Einstein, The New York Times, United Nations, Apple Inc., and Harvard Law School, linking facts about World War II, The Mona Lisa, Amazon (company), Leonardo da Vinci, Google, and Stanford University. Freebase connected information on figures including William Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Elon Musk, Sigmund Freud, and Ada Lovelace, as well as works like Hamlet (play), Star Wars, The Economist, and Time (magazine).

Overview

Freebase was designed to store structured data about entities such as Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Coca-Cola, Toyota Motor Corporation, Tokyo, and Oxford University. Its goal overlapped with projects like Wikidata, DBpedia, YAGO, Bing (search engine), and efforts by IBM and Facebook to leverage knowledge graphs for products including Google Knowledge Graph and Apple Siri. The platform allowed contributors to add topics on William Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mount Everest, Nobel Prize, United States Congress, BBC, and Reuters while linking to sources like Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, and National Archives.

History and Development

Freebase originated at a company founded by individuals with backgrounds at Metaweb Technologies and was associated with engineers and entrepreneurs linked to MIT, Stanford University, and Y Combinator. In 2010 it was acquired by Google alongside other acquisitions such as YouTube (earlier) and later integrations with DoubleClick and AdMob. Development milestones intersected with projects at Yahoo!, Wikimedia Foundation, and research from Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The platform evolved amid broader trends including the rise of semantic web research groups at University of California, Berkeley and industry adoption by Microsoft Research and Facebook AI Research.

Data Model and Technology

Freebase used a graph-based data model influenced by standards from World Wide Web Consortium, RDF work from Tim Berners-Lee advocates and schema ideas related to Schema.org. Its query language, MQL, returned JSON similar to outputs used by Google APIs and programming environments like Python (programming language), JavaScript, and Ruby (programming language). Backend infrastructure incorporated techniques comparable to those used by Apache Hadoop, Bigtable-style storage in Google Cloud Platform and indexing strategies familiar to Lucene and Elasticsearch. Contributors could link entities tied to The Louvre, Smithsonian Institution, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union standards.

Content and Coverage

Content included millions of topics covering persons such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Mahatma Gandhi, Franz Kafka, Ada Lovelace, organizations like United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, World Health Organization, Ford Motor Company, works like The Odyssey, Don Quixote, events such as French Revolution, Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, and places including New York City, London, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney Opera House. The dataset referenced authoritative sources such as Encyclopædia Britannica, Library of Congress, National Geographic, BBC News, and Associated Press. Coverage spanned disciplines linked to institutions like Massachusetts General Hospital, Johns Hopkins University, Royal Society, and American Museum of Natural History.

Integration and Use Cases

Freebase data powered product features and research at companies such as Google for entity recognition, at Microsoft for knowledge panels, in academic projects at Stanford University and University of Oxford, and in startups incubated at Y Combinator. Developers accessed dumps used with tools from Apache Spark, Neo4j, and PostgreSQL, and integrated content into applications by teams at Facebook, Amazon (company), Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber. Use cases included enriching search results for BBC, enhancing recommendation systems for Spotify, supporting digital assistants like Siri (software), and powering semantic analytics in enterprises such as Bloomberg L.P. and McKinsey & Company.

Legacy and Shutdown

Following strategic consolidation with other knowledge initiatives, Freebase was deprecated and its data was migrated to projects including Wikidata and components of the Google Knowledge Graph. The transition affected contributors from communities around Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, DBpedia and research groups at University of California, Berkeley, MIT Media Lab, and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Its technology influenced later efforts at Google Research, Microsoft Research, Amazon Web Services, and open data movements involving Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons. The closure reshaped how institutions such as Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, Harvard Library and British Library approached linked open data.

Category:Knowledge bases