[Developers] Question about the backend software and data

[Steven Ericsson-Zenith]

I am interested in the Metaweb position with respect to XQuery. Will  
freebase provide an implementation of XQuery and, if so, what happens  
then to MQL?

Freebase is an interesting experiment. But apart from the issues of  
category development that are already becoming apparent, I see the  
conflict between XQuery and MQL as significant. Isn't it in  
Freebase's interest to support XQuery?

Sincerely,
Steven

--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://iase.info
http://senses.info



On Sep 28, 2007, at 3:34 PM, Johann Petrak wrote:

> Thank you for the clarification about backend software and data!
> Regarding MQL/the API I'd be interested if the company regards
> the language and API description
> itself as some sort of IP or if the re-implementation of
> (parts of) MQL or the API would be explicitly allowed.
>
> Tim Kientzle wrote:
>>> Is the data only accessible via the query API? ...
>>> This would be important differences to e.g. Wikipedia where ...
>>> the backend data is fully available as a dump ...
>>
>> We intend to make our data available via some form of bulk
>> dump.  Determining a good format is still an open question;
>> something like RDF would be very complete, but less accessible
>> for many people.  Some form of tabular dump of particular
>> areas might be more useful to more people.
>>
>> We'd be very interested to know what kind of dumps people
>> are creating for their own use (remember that any dump tool we
>> would create would pull data using exactly the same API that
>> you have access to).  That would help us understand what formats
>> would be most useful to people.
>>
>
> I have not yet looked at the details of the data, but from what
> I have seen it seems that RDF or some other triple language would
> probably allow a rather complete representation that would be
> compatible with existing standards / tools.
>
> Personally I think completeness to be more important than
> trivial accessability.
>
> Cheers,
>   Johann
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