[Developers] New user with MQL question

[Faye Harris]

Hi Alex,

What are you looking for?

If you're looking for instances of a specific type, be it /music/album 
or /music/artist or /film/actor, then regardless of MQL or 
/api/service/search, you still need to constrain your query with the 
desired type so that unqualified results are eliminated. If you need all 
properties for a specific topic, you need a way to uniquely identify 
that topic within Freebase. ID is best, which for The Police includes 
/en/the_police.

If you're doing nothing but keyword match, similar to search using a 
traditional search engine, then no knowledge about Freebase types is 
required since you're not taking advantage of them to improve your 
search results.

-- Faye


Shawn Simister wrote:
> The URL to look up "The Police" using the Search API would be:
>
> http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search?query=The%20Police
>
> There are additional parameters for mql_filter and mql_output if you 
> want to further customize the output. Just click the more link at the 
> end of the description on the Search API 
> <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/api_service_search> page to get a 
> description of the different parameters.
>
> Shawn
>
> Alex Genadinik wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Thank you very much for your responses.  So if I was to use the 
>> search API to be able to get results for "The Police" without knowing 
>> the Freebase ID for that topic, what would the URL look like for 
>> this?  There would still be an MQL search string in the URL, correct? 
>>
>> Thank you very much,
>> Alex
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:10:09 -0400
>> From: narphorium at gmail.com
>> To: developers at freebase.com
>> Subject: Re: [Developers] New user with MQL question
>>
>> 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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