[Developers] Schools, Colleges, Data loading and more...

[Robert Cook]

Paul -- Your questions are very good.  You'll notice that we're still  
getting the basics going, but everything you've mentioned we've  
seriously considered.  Feedback like yours helps us prioritize which  
features we do first.

On Jul 2, 2007, at 4:20 PM, Paul Lindner wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I was recently invited to the Freebase alpha.  I like what I see!  I
> work for Hi5 and we can see a ton of potential here.
>
> Couple of questions though.
>
> * What about internationalization?  Are there facilities for storing
>   different names based on language?  Or would that be a
>   specialization of an existing type?
>
>     For example the city New York City is Nueva York in Spanish
>
>   This looks like a big problem and I hope it gets solved in a
>   comprehensive way.  It would be nice to see the ability to mark
>   certain text as the canonical form and allow other translations to
>   be made.

Internationalization is part of our core infrastructure, although  
we've done little so far to surface that in the UI.  Hundreds of  
thousands of topics already have labels in multiple languages.  We'll  
be adding more UI support for internationalization soon.

>   Then if the canonical form is changed the other languages
>   can be flagged for re-verification.

This is a clever idea -- we view topic name changes as an important  
event (mostly for vandalism control), but this could help guide  
translators.

>
> * Is there any planned integration with geonames.org?

We've considered it, and I believe our Minister of Information (Jamie  
Taylor) has spoken with them.  Geo is also important to us, so we  
will be trying to work with existing systems.

> * Hi5 has a large database of schools we could contribute.  Most of
>   these are imported from official sources, we could just submit the
>   data but I'm more interested in contributing tools that can be  
> used to
>   refresh data from offical sources.  What's the best way to do that?

We have an internal tool that allows you to upload spreadsheets and  
(most importantly) reconcile the data with existing topics.  We're  
working hard to make this available to contributors.  In the  
meantime, we could work closely with you to get it loaded.

We should chat more (off this email list, so not to bore people)  
about the structure of your data.

> * Would it be possible to integrate editing / submitting functionality
>   on external sites?  Something better than just a link to the
>   freebase edit page might be interesting.
	
Surprisingly, Freebase is actually an "external site" in that it uses  
the same APIs that anybody else should use.  Our current  
functionality is a bit complex to package up for others to use, so we  
will be putting together some functions (autocomplete in particular)  
to make it easier for developers to create write-enabled applications.

> * How about OpenID authentication for contributors?  This would
>   obviously be something for post-alpha.

We've have a couple of questions about OpenID support.  We are fans  
of open standards and we'll try to support them to the extent we can.

> In any case, glad to see this effort and am excited about the
> possibilities that it offers.

Thank you.  Please keep the questions coming.

Robert


> -- 
> Paul Lindner        ||||| | | | |  |  |  |   |   |
> lindner at inuus.com
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