Freebase is a growing database that’s been created as a central location for global knowledge. Still in private beta, Freebase has gained a lot of attention for its efforts, and may prove to be a very useful tool on several fronts.
The Freebase database is accessible and editable by anyone, and has already been seeded with over 2 million topics from other resources such as Wikipedia and Music Brainz. Performing a search will provide you with a list of results that can be further filtered by more key words. Say you do a general search on “cash.” Your results can be filtered by just about anything. Begin typing in “mon-” and Freebase will show you the topics that begin with these letters, such as “money value” or “monetary range.” Pretty much anything you search comes full circle, as there are new directions to search in for nearly all that Freebase has in store. Searching a film could lead you into a people search, which could further take you to a location search. If you see something incorrect along the way, feel free to change it. While you can create your own topics, you cannot edit the administrative aspects others’. All of the information added to Freebase is saved under the Creative Commons copyright standards.
The other main aspect of Freebase also offers its search tools for developers to include in their own websites and products. These types of searches could be used for a music discovery service or a number of things. Several resources are offered by Freebase specifically for developers, with an API offering to meet the needs of many. This overall approach to creating a semantic search is quite a feat, but Freebase is a unique approach to an age-old problem, and has found an interesting way to leverage the collaborative community in order to achieve its goals.
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