Freebase (database)
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 wiki 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 run publicly beginning in March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced on 16 July 2010. Google's Knowledge Graph is powered in part by Freebase.
Type of site | Online database |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Metaweb Technologies (Google) |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 3 March 2007 |
| Current status | Offline (since 2 May 2016), succeeded by Wikidata |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution License |
During its existence, 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 is provided for programmers.
On 16 December 2014, Google announced that it would shut down Freebase over the succeeding six months and help with the move of the data from Freebase to Wikidata.
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.
Both Graphd and MQL, the graph database and JSON-based query language developed by Metaweb for Freebase, are open-sourced by Google under the Apache 2.0 license, and are available on GitHub. Graphd is open-sourced on September 8, 2018. MQL is open-sourced on August 4, 2020.