Freebase

Some friends complain that I talk a lot about Git, so to even out a bit, I'll talk about my current favorite Website.

Yes, amongst all the sites I know or visited, there is one that takes the title "Current favorite", in the singular form.

Its Freebase. Its a Wikipedia with a decent database schema. You can query it in much richer ways, like "Directors of $10M+ companies who have starred in movies" (the query for this can be seen on the left, as "Show this query in MQL"), or "Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies".

Lately a couple of articles on their blog caught my eye (in reverse chronological order):

• Visualizing corporate America: how to turn the information inside Freebase into a roadmap of corporate interests;
• Full data dumps are now available: not only they have the data, but they share it too;
• 3.26 million: how many entries and where are they coming from.

If you want a quick tour, checkout a recent Freebase screencast.

After that, check out the cool toys^H^Hols other people have written using Freebase.

Recommended.