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

[Tim Kientzle]

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

As Chris Madsen mentioned, our underlying data model already
supports full internationalization (a "name" is the value of
a link between an object and a language; any object can have
names in any number of languages).  We do plan to fully
internationalize our own applications, but applications
using our public APIs can be fully internationalized today.

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

I'll let someone from our data group answer this.

> * Hi5 has a large database of schools we could contribute.  ...
> What's the best way to do that?

I'll let someone from our data group address that question
in detail, but I can say that other developers are building
tools against our public API to push data into our system.

We also have a number of internal tools and development libraries
that we plan to eventually expose for broad use.  The first such
is the MJT templating system http://mjtemplate.org/ that makes it
very easy to build browser-based applications that run against our  
system.

> * 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.

Our API includes write facilities that developers can use
to integrate editing capabilities into externally-hosted
applications.  To limit abuse, we do have some default
restrictions on bulk writes, but we're eager to work with
outside developers.  Please let us know what you need.

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

We're looking into it.

Tim Kientzle