So what’s been happening on the blogosphere after John Giannandrea’s keynote at ISWC and the revelation that Freebase now produces Linked Data from an RDF service…

Tetherless World sums up the Freebase facts (e.g. 156,000,000 assertions made; 1370 published types; 75 domains; graph model, identity, web based) and further points out that ontology, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit ... creation “is a social process, and both freebaseFreebase is a large collaborative knowledge base. It is an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual 'wiki' contribution. Freebase aims to create a global resource which allows people (and machines) to access common information more effectively. It is ... and semantic wiki are tools that enable users to create ontological vocabulary without worrying too much on building a comprehensive ontology.”

Inkdroid notes that the RDF service release “is important news because Freebase is an active community of content creators, creating rich data-centric descriptions with a wiki style interface, fancy data loaders, and useful machine APIs.” This is followed up by a quick and handy tutorial how you can get machine readable data back from freebase using a URI with Freebase. Conclusion:

So why is this important? Because following your nose in HTML is what enabled companiesA company is a form of business organization. In the United States, a company is a corporation—or, less commonly, an association, partnership, or union—that carries on an industrial enterprise. " Generally, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock ... like Lycos, AltaVista, YahooYahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California,, that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and ... and GoogleGoogle Inc. is a multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was ... to be born. It allowed for agents to be able to crawl the web of documents and build indexes of the data to allow people to find what they want (hopefully). Being able to link data in this way allows us to harvest data assets across organizational boundaries and merge them together. It’s early days still, but seeing an organization like Freebase get it is pretty exciting.

Yves RaimondSenior Software Engineer at BBC Audio & Music interactive. PhD at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London. Interested in music, music technologies, digital signal processing, open-source and semantic-web technologies. (http://moustaki.org/) was the first to wonder on the public W3C LOD mailinglist: “now, to see whether it links to other datasets ” – the idea of having linked data without the linkage would indeed seem like love’s labour lost. Semantic Focus / James Simmons seconds: “One downside is the data doesn’t appear to link to external resources, in a sense walling itself in. It should be trivial to link the topics that came from Wikipedia back to Wikipedia as well as DBpediaDBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured information from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources, ... (which would be killer, by the way).” This is followed up a later post, where James expresses concerns regarding the relationship DBpedia / Freebase: “Freebase may see a drop in userbase growth and participation if it becomes a mirror of DBpedia (or vice-versaVersa is a specialized language for addressing and querying nodes and arcs in a Resource Description Framework (RDF) model. It uses a simple and expressive syntax, designed to be incorporated into other expression systems, including XML, where, for instance, Versa can be used in extension ...) and the popularity once garnered by one project may shift towards the other, or away entirely.”

More News / Andrew Newman puts the Freebase RDF service release in context with Cathrin Weiss’ “250 million triples on your iphone” submission, iMoCo, to the Billion triples challenges, also DBpedia and Semaplorer, developed at the University of Koblenz:

DBPedia stood out because it was the only one that allowed you to write data to the Semantic Web rather than just read the carefully prepared triples. For a similar reason I though SemaPlorer was good because they tried to do more than just the standard triples but went that extra bit further by making it more generic like integrating flickrFlickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that .... But they were all excellent, all of them showing what you get with a billion or more triples and inferencing.

That combined with the guys at Freebase making all of their data available as RDF and it was a big day for the Semantic Web.

ARQtick / AndyS plays a bit with the Blade Runner example cited by Freebase, e.g. takes a look at the graph, looks for interesting properties and extracts author names

N.B. If you want to follow ARQtick’s example: use the Linked Data browser plugin Tabulator or go to the Marbles site to view the RDF – without a data browser you’ll be redirected to the HTML page. You will also need it to make sense of rdf.freebase.com.