Freebase boot camp

Freebase is an open, creative-commons-licensed repository of structured data about over 12 million entities. Freebase has information about people, places, organisations, historical events, books, and all kinds of other things.  As an open database, we encourage data contributions on any subject from the community. And you can use Freebase’s data and API to build mashups or connect disparate data sets together.

We’d like to run a bootcamp to show off Freebase’s data and what you can do with it.  We’ll start with an overview and then get our hands dirty with some practical how-tos.

Some of the areas we can cover include:

• overview of Freebase’s data (what do we have, where do we get it, what’s our coverage and quality)
• MQL (our query language) and how to use it to ask Freebase questions
• the Freebase API and hosted app development platform (Acre)
• Freebase as ID/key repository, using Freebase to connect different data sets
• Google Refine (previously known as Gridworks), using Gridworks to clean up, visualise, and reconcile data
• how to create schema/vocabulary and add data to Freebase
• Freebase and the semantic web/linked open data/RDF

There are two Freebase people attending (Kirrily and Jamie) so we’ll do this together and between us we should be able to cover just about any Freebase-related topic! Please come with questions or ideas and we’ll try and tailor our bootcamp content to what you want to know.

test Filed under BootCamp | Comments (3)