Freebase is a large public database that collects data, texts, and media about over 12 million entities. It structures this information using types and properties, and users can access and query the database using its API, MQL query language, or Acre application platform. Freebase also aims to be a collaborative project, sourcing its information from user contributions as well as existing sources like Wikipedia.

1. Deconstructing Freebase
Manuel de la Villa
Department of Information Technologies
University of Huelva Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

2. Deconstructing Freebase
• What is it
– A net? A tool? A kind of Data? wikipedia-turned-
database?
• The Schema,
– domains, types, properties. Sources.
• How it works
• How can we use it
– MQL, API, Acre, RDF
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

3. What is it
• Freebase is a large public database that collects three
kinds of information:
– data;
– texts; and
– media, that references…
• …entities or topics (≈ 12 million). An entity is a unique
single person, place, or thing.
• A single concept or real-world thing.
• A topic could also be called an entity, resource or element or thing, it
is a fundamental unit in Freebase.
• /common/topic
• Each topic has a Guid or globally unique ID
– http://www.freebase.com/view/en/barack_obama
– http://www.freebase.com/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000029c277
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

4. What is it (and II)
• Freebase connects entities together as a graph,
– defines its data structure as a set of nodes and a set of
links that establish relationships between the nodes.
• Most of our topics are associated with one or
more types (such as people, places, books,
films, etc) and may have additional properties like "date of
birth" for a person or latitude and longitude for a location.
These types and properties and related concepts are called
Schema.
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

5. The Schema
• We use the term Schema to refer to the way Freebase's data is laid out or
structured. In the Semantic web world, this is referred to as Ontology.
• Schema in Freebase is expressed through Types and Properties. Types are
grouped together in Domains.
What is Schema?
Schema describes how data in Freebase is structured.
Schema is made by creating:
Types, which define a particular kind of person, place or thing and contain
Properties, which define the unique qualities of a type.
William Shakespeare
is a → type → Person
has a → property → Date of Birth
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

6. The Schema (II)
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

7. The Schema (II)
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

8. The Schema (II)
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

9. The Schema (II)
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

10. The Schema: Medicine
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

11. Then… is an Ontology?
• Yes and No,
is a kind of Folksonomy…
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

12. The sources
• Wikipedia, ChefMoz, NNDB, MusicBrainz…
• The Freebase community, with a 2.0 spirit, are:
• data contributors,
• schema builders,
• data curators,
• application developers,
• and many others who use Freebase
– Expert status
– Augmentative edition
• Creative Commons Attribution Licensing, which means
that it's free for you to browse, query, copy, and even use the data
in your own systems or software, even for commercial use; all we
ask in return is that you mention that
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

13. How can we use it…
• As a reference or information source
• Create interesting Views and Visualizations and
share them with others
• Embed Freebase data in your website
• Use our API or Acre, our hosted app development
platform, to build apps that use Freebase data
• Download our Data dumps
• Use Freebase's RDF for Semantic Web applications
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

14. How can we use it…
• Ways to use Freebase:
– Use Freebase's Ids to uniquely identify entities
anywhere on the web
– Query Freebase's data using MQL
– Build applications using our API or Acre, the
hosted development platform
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

15. MQL (Metaweb Query Language)
• http://api.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query={"query"
:{"type":"/music/artist","name":"U2","album":[]}}
• Query Editor
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

16. MQL (and II)
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

17. Freebase API
Freebase's API allows you:
– to perform searches and queries against
Freebase's data, or
– to write data to Freebase.
– There are Libraries available for many
languages.
Searching with Search API
• The search API lets you do a fuzzily-matched
search for a string that occurs in a topic's
name, aliases, or description.
Reading
• The mqlread API is for doing structured
queries against Freebase's schema.
Writing
• The mqlwrite API lets you write data to
Freebase.
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

18. Acre
A hosted application
development platform,
Acre:
• makes it easy to build and
share Freebase applications.
•It encapsulates many of the
trickier steps (like OAuth
access for writing to
Freebase) and
•lets you view other people's
apps, clone them, modify
them, and share your
improvements.
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

19. Applications… with Acre
• Powerset (NLP search engine)
• Fmdb
• Freebase
Sets
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

20. RDF
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010

21. Summarizing
"Freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision
of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more
structured world of the semantic web." Tim O'Reilly
Medical-Miner Project
Huelva 22/7/2010