Jonathan Lowe

Several companies have noticed the value in collaboration, OSM, geocommons, google base, others..

Structured databases means they can collaborate world

Basics of freebase

Web based database of community entered data managed by metawhere.

Freebases data includes but is not exclusively spatial.

Have seen three glue domains, business, people, location.

Began with points, 262,000 locations, exposing an API this summer. Mashups will be able to query freebase for spatial data in multiple formats as well as the other data.

Examples on openlayers, google maps, others.

“What is semantically structured data?”

  • Strongly typed data
  • Hardwired data relationships

Enter “olympic torch” into google, from results extract descriptive text, filter out the search term. Send results to engine that generates tag clouds, then show resulting tag cloud to people who don’t know the search term. Ask them to guess.

foundation cookbook bertolli shattuck grouemet california restaurant berkeley alice waters - What is Chez Panisse? Semantic meaning gives a lot of information

Brains are very good at semantics, which classify or type data, and form relationships.

What were brains doing? Noticing Alice and Waters were names, saw “co-founder” - that’s people. Maybe Alice Waters is a co-founder. Saw “restaurant”, that’s a business, started by a co-founder. Might have noticed references to place. Put them together and get restaurant in berkeley, california, co-founded by alice waters to get Chez Panisse.

How to put this into a database?

Entries have multiple types of properties, properties have relationships. Business entry has geospatial data, as does alice waters. Berkeley has its own properties, these properties relate to the chez panisse and alice waters.

If I went to Berkeley and want funding perhaps these relationships can help me, freebase can show these.

“Relevance by faceted browsers”

Search in results for references to people, then kinds of people.

A Data Source to Make Mashups Correct, Complete, Relevant and Revisited

Technorati tags: mashups, freebase, where, where2.0, where2008