I've been a skeptic of the Wikidata project at times but over the long run I have seem them do the right things and get results.
The trouble with Freebase is that it never had much of a community. Part of it was that it didn't need it because they had paid curators, but there were many other factors that made things difficult, but primarily if i need to make a data set to do task A, I can get maybe 50-90% of the way there with Freebase, but then I have to my own curation and I may need to disagree with Freebase about particular things and just not deal with the whole hassle of reconciling with the source system.
Also the cc-by license let people use Freebase data without contributing anything substantial back; this certainly led to more people using Freebase, but some kind of viral license might force organizations to make contributions back.
On a technical basis, the continuation of Freebase in the sense of a live and updated :BaseKB could be done by a few measures: (i) you need some system for controlling the issue of mid identifiers, (ii) you can then add and remove any facts you want, and (iii) if there was a good RDF-based "data wiki" that scales to the right size you should be able to load it in there and go.
The funding issue for that looks tricky to me. I think both consumers and funding agencies want to see something that addresses some particular problem, so what you really need to do is to do what Google did, and use Freebase to not as a fish that was caught for you, but as way to learn how to fish.
On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 2:43 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, I am pleased to learn the data is still available to you. I wish Wikidata would do better. As a follow up on what your wrote, I blogged about the failure to support the Freebase community. Thanks, GerardM
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/07/wikidata-failing-freebase-communi...
On 15 July 2015 at 21:25, Paul Houle ontology2@gmail.com wrote:
For those who are interested in the project of getting something out of Freebase for use in Wikidata or somewhere else, I'd like to point out
this a completely workable solution for running queries out of Freebase after the MQL API goes dark.
I have been watching the discussion about the trouble moving Freebase data to Wikidata and let me share some thoughts.
First quality is in the eye of the beholder and if somebody defines that quality is a matter of citing your sources, than that is their definition of 'quality' and they can attain it. You might have some other definition of quality and be appalled that Wikidata has so little to say about a topic that has caused much controversy and suffering:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q284451
there are ways to attain that too.
Part of the answer is that different products are going to be used in different places. For instance, one person might need 100% coverage of books he wants to talk about, another one might want a really great database of ski areas, etc.
Note that Freebase did a lot of human curation and we know they could get about 3000 verifications of facts by "non-experts" a day who were paid for their efforts. That scales out to almost a million facts per FTE per year.
-- Paul Houle
*Applying Schemas for Natural Language Processing, Distributed Systems, Classification and Text Mining and Data Lakes*
(607) 539 6254 paul.houle on Skype ontology2@gmail.com https://legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup/ http://legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup/
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