[Developers] South Carolina weirdness

[Christopher R. Maden]

Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP] <casperOne at caspershouse.com> wrote:
> 	If one is able to have data in a schema which doesn't conform to the
> schema, it raises a serious question as to how reliable Freebase is as a
> data source.

It’s probably worth noting that Freebase is explicitly *not* rigorous, at least not that way.  Properties can show up that belong to types not attached to types, uniqueness can change, expected types can alter...  It’s a (possibly) messy but ultimately (we hope) useful community gumbo pot, not an enterprise data management solution.

Remember that TimBL’s World Wide Web succeeded where other hypertext projects failed largely on the decision to just let links break, rather than trying to rigorously ensure link integrity across the entire system.  Freebase is a roughly analogous approach to open structured data.

(That said, MQL does have a bunch of checks and we run data validators in the background, but the point still holds, I think.)

~Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden
Data Architect
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
<URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >