[Developers] Freebase newbie: simple question

[Shawn Simister]

Pito,

I haven't used Httparty before but its looks like a very useful gem 
given that it can download a URI and parse the JSON all in one call.

There are two ways to find states that match "mass". The first way would 
be to constrain the query that I gave earlier using an MQL filter like this:

[
    {
        "country" : {
            "id" : "/en/united_states"
        },
       
        "iso_3166_2_code" : null,
        "name" : null,
        "filter1:name~=" : "Mass*",
        "type" : "/location/administrative_division"
    }
]

The other way is to query the /common/topic/alias property like this:

[
    {
        "/common/topic/alias" : "Mass.",
        "country" : {
            "id" : "/en/united_states"
        },
        "iso_3166_2_code" : null,
        "name" : null,
        "type" : "/location/administrative_division"
    }
]

The benefit of using the alias property is that it will also match 
non-trivial aliases like "Sunshine State" 
<http://www.freebase.com/tools/queryeditor?q=%5B%7B%22/common/topic/alias%22:%22Sunshine%20State%22,%22country%22:%7B%22id%22:%22/en/united_states%22%7D,%22iso_3166_2_code%22:null,%22name%22:null,%22type%22:%22/location/administrative_division%22%7D%5D&read=1>. 
The down-side is that a lot of the common aliases haven't been entered 
into Freebase yet so you might have to add them in by yourself to get it 
to a usable level of accuracy (I had to manually add "Mass." as an alias 
to Massachusetts <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/massachusetts> to make 
the 2nd query work).

Shawn

Pito Salas wrote:
> Hi Shawn
>
> Do you know the httparty gem. It makes it really easy to do what we need here.
>
> So... What if I wanted any US states that have the letters "mass" in
> their name? Is there magic syntax for thatz?
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Pito
>
>   
>> require 'net/http'
>>
>> query_string =
>> '{"query":{"country":{"id":"/en/united_states"},"iso_3166_2_code":null,"name":"Massachusetts","type":"/location/administrative_division"}}'
>> query_uri = URI.parse('http://www.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query=' +
>> URI.escape(query_string))
>> result = Net::HTTP.get(query_uri)
>>
>> Then it's just a matter of parsing the JSON, getting the value of
>> iso_3166_2_code and removing the "US-" from the beginning.
>>
>> Shawn
>>
>>
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>>     
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