This is a big shame. Freebase was by far the most consistent of the open data graphs.<p>With my cynic hat on I think they're being forced by larger strategy. The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor, and I suspect the Knowledge Graph API will be somewhat more restrictive in what you're allowed to do with it.<p>The thing is the more you get into this stuff the more you envy Facebook's position where people give them structured data on a plate.
I'm sorry if I missed this, but what will happen to the Freebase software? I always found that to be a strong asset, but Wikidata's is less than stellar. They only mention the data and APIs here.
Has anybody here used DBpedia? If so, how do you see it in relation to Wikidata? Do the projects overlap? Or, might they serve complementary purposes, with, say, DBpedia extracting data from Wikidata (rather than from Wikipedia drirectly)?
Wikidatan here. Here's a quick comparison of Freebase and Wikidata:<p>Topics / items:<p>- Freebase: 46,476,860 [1]<p>- Wikidata: 12,921,731 [2]<p>Facts / claims:<p>- Freebase: 2,696,141,481 [1]<p>- Wikidata: 50,457,200 as of 2014-11-10 [3]<p>Instances of person / human:<p>- Freebase: 3,391,533 [4]<p>- Wikidata: 2,638,614 [5]<p>License for data<p>- Freebase: CC-BY [6]<p>- Wikidata: CC0 [7]<p>Data on Paul Graham:<p>- Freebase: <a href="http://www.freebase.com/m/017cm9" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/m/017cm9</a><p>- Wikidata: <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92650" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92650</a><p>Data on San Francisco:<p>- Freebase: <a href="http://www.freebase.com/m/0d6lp" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/m/0d6lp</a><p>- Wikidata: <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62</a><p>Data on Python:<p>- Freebase: <a href="http://www.freebase.com/m/05z1_" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/m/05z1_</a><p>- Wikidata: <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28865" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28865</a><p>Data on APOE / Apolipoprotein E:<p>- Freebase: <a href="http://www.freebase.com/m/0byv2v" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/m/0byv2v</a><p>- Wikidata: <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q14890468" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q14890468</a> (APOE), <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q424728" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q424728</a> (Apolipoprotein E)<p>See [8] and [9] for an introduction to Wikidata. I have no notable experience with Freebase, but I've been contributing to Wikidata for about 2 years and would be happy to answer any questions I can.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.freebase.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.wikidata.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikidata.org</a><p>[3] <a href="http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php" rel="nofollow">http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.freebase.com/people/person?instances" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/people/person?instances</a><p>[5] <a href="http://tools.wmflabs.org/autolist" rel="nofollow">http://tools.wmflabs.org/autolist</a>
/autolist1.html?q=claim[31:5]<p>[6] <a href="http://www.freebase.com/policies/tos" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebase.com/policies/tos</a><p>[7] See bottom of [2]<p>[8] Up and running with Wikidata: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/_emw/up-and-running-with-wikidata" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/_emw/up-and-running-with-wikidata</a><p>[9] Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web: <a href="http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf</a>
<i>"The move to Wikidata is a bit ironic, given that some of the data sitting inside of Freebase — including musician genres, album names, and record labels, for instance — originated from pages on Wikipedia, which the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation hosts. And Googlers understand that."</i><p><a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/google-plans-to-integrate-its-fact-database-freebase-into-wikimedias-wikidata/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/google-plans-to-integrate-...</a>
Doesn't Bing use Freebase for some search result panels? I suppose they'll just transfer over to Wikidata, but it seems funny that Google might have just added a lot of development time to some Bing developers to migrate APIs.
I think this decision is a proof of the maturity of the Freebase comunity.<p>I always heard of open source community splitting, which is fragmenting the forces working on each project and lowering the quality of each products. Doing the opposite here will lead to one great product rather than two "not bad" products competing against each others.
A year ago I developed an android client for freebase, but unfortunately I never had the chance to finish or publish it.<p>I guess now it's too late :D<p>If anybody is interested the apk is here<p><a href="http://goo.gl/6BxAZJ" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/6BxAZJ</a>