[Developers] New user with MQL question

[Shawn Simister]

There seem to be two parts to this question. First, you would like to be 
able to get results for "The Police" without knowing the Freebase ID for 
that topic. Second, you would like to get a list of attributes for that 
topic without knowing the specific property IDs.

The first part is a bit difficult because Freebase currently has 14 
different topics called "The Police". That's why it's a lot easier to 
narrow down the results if you know which Freebase type you're looking 
for. Another alternative is to use the Freebase Search API 
<http://www.freebase.com/view/en/api_service_search> which will give you 
a list of topics about "The Police" sorted in order of relevance. You 
should be able to get reasonably good results by just taking the first 
result that you get back from the search API as long as you're only 
dealing with popular topics like The Police (the band).

The second part is much more straight-forward and can be done by 
searching for all the links (/type/link) that are attached to the topic 
that you're interested in. I wrote up a brief description of how to do 
it 
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/694037/write-a-freebase-mql-query-that-gets-everything-back-about-a-given-topic> 
over at StackOverflow a couple weeks ago.

Shawn

Alex Genadinik wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am new to the list and am experimenting with freebase.  I am looking 
> at MQL
> and I think the biggest question I have is that sometimes I do not 
> know the URI or the path
> of the topic I am querying for.  I just want to throw in a term like 
> "The Police" and
> get back results about them without having to provide the path 
> /music/album
>
> Is that possible in MQL?  How would I do that?
>
> Sincerely,
> Alex Genadinik
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