[Developers] Built With Freebase: Creative Commons Car Pictures

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Paul Houle <paul at ontology2.com> wrote:

> Tom Morris wrote:
>> - A relative comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of Freebase as
>> compared to DBpedia, if there's more to it than what's described above
>>
>    A short answer is that depends on the problem domain.
...
> My impression is that more than 50% of topics in Freebase are untyped

That's off by an order of magnitude.  It was closer to 5% the last
time I looked.

> however,  in most cases a person could put an existing type easily.

Like users of the Typewriter application do every day?

>    Well,  the first step of the "o.e." I'm talking about is to
> construct taxonomic skeletons for dbpedia and freebase and lay them side
> by side:  I'll be able to say something more informed at that point.

That would be interesting, but I think it's only part of the story.  A
complete taxonomy is no good if it's not applied to the topics.  One
of the things that I use my Untyped application for is to look at
topics which haven't been typed (and fix them if it's something
important to me).  All topics are not created equal, so it's not
purely a numbers game either.  Some topics (e.g. locations) are much
more important than others.

Tom