Freebase
 |
|
|
Type of site
|
Online database |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Metaweb Technologies (Google) |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 18,151 (May 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active - |
|
Content license
|
Creative Commons Attribution License |
Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted contributions. Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively. It was developed by the American software company Metaweb and ran publicly since March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced 16 July 2010. Google's Knowledge Graph was powered in part by Freebase.
Freebase data was available for commercial and non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and an open API, RDF endpoint, and a database dump was provided for programmers.
On 16 December 2014, Knowledge Graph announced that it would shut down Freebase over the succeeding six months and help with the move of the data from Freebase to .
On 16 December 2015, Google officially announced the Knowledge Graph API, which is meant to be a replacement to the Freebase API. Freebase.com was officially shut down on 2 May 2016.
Described by Tim O'Reilly upon the launch, "Freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web".
Freebase contained data harvested from sources such as , NNDB, Fashion Model Directory and MusicBrainz, as well as data contributed by its users. The structured data was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, and a JSON-based API was provided to programmers for developing applications on any platform to utilize the Freebase data. The source code for the Metaweb application itself was proprietary.
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