Freebase for Structured Content

Freebase.com might be the forerunner of the semantic web that has long been talked about. Ivor Tossell at the Globe and Mail described in A web that can read itself may be in our future (Sept 10)

"Freebase, like Wikipedia, is an open encyclopedia that most anyone can edit. But alongside each free-form article in Freebase, there are database fields for relevant hard data points. If the article is about a movie, you'll find fields for its release date, director, producer, screenwriters and so on. If the article is about a city, it will have fields for the city's population and location. If the article is about an artist, it will have a field for every one of that artist's works."

Freebase is an open project for building structured data applications using types and defined properties. Film will have one set or properties, geographic places another set. It will support complex queries.

From the FAQ - "Finally, while information in Freebase appears to be structured much like a conventional database, it’s actually built on a system that allows any user to contribute to the schemas—or frameworks—that hold the data. This wiki-like approach to structuring information lets many people organize the database without formal, centralized planning. And it lets subject experts who don’t have database expertise find one another, and then build and maintain the data in their domain of interest."