[Developers] New user with MQL question

[Andi Vajda]

On Apr 17, 2009, at 12:21, Shawn Simister <narphorium at gmail.com> 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 page to get a  
> description of the different parameters.

Sadly, this doc is a little too succinct and incomplete.
http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search?help
is the more complete and authoritative documentation
for this API.

Andi..

>
>
> 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  
>> 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 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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