[Developers] looking for people

[Faye Harris]

Hi,

When it comes to including middle initials in searching for people in Freebase, the problem oftentimes is simply the lack of data on middle initials.

In order for /api/service/search to find a person by query "Foo A. Bar", that string has to exist in Freebase as either a 1) topic name, 2) alias, 3) prefix match for name (where omissions are allowed), or 4) Wikipedia anchor text. If this person only exists in Freebase as "Foo Bar", without any alias or a Wikipedia anchor text pointing to "Foo A. Bar", then using the latter will not find the former. You can, however, find a person named "Foo A. Bar" in Freebase with a partial string such as "Foo Bar" (or "A. Bar", "Foo A", etc.). 

I understand that it may be frustrating to have to disambiguate search results as an extra step when a "first-name last-name" search on people can return more than a single match. I'm hoping that as the Freebase community adds more data, and as the APIs improve, problems like this will occur less and less frequently.

-- Faye


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Morris" <tfmorris at gmail.com>
To: "For discussions about MQL, Freebase API and apps built on Freebase" <developers at freebase.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2009 8:37:04 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [Developers] looking for people

"Also known as" in the web client doesn't come from the 'name' field,
but from the 'alias' field.

Finding people by name in Freebase takes a lot of work.  I recently
loaded up the Thomas IDs for all the U.S. congress folks and almost
all of the work was in finding the right people to work with (and the
search API isn't much help either).

Tom

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Milan Andric <mandric at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to get details on people and it has been working well
> until I ran up against a case that only returns an empty list.
> The query looks like :
>
> query  = [{
>        "name~=":'Bobby L. Rush',
>        "name" : [],
>        "type"  : "/people/person",
>        "gender" : None,
>        #"*":[{}],
>        'place_of_birth':None,
>        'date_of_birth':None,
>        'profession':[],
>        'key':[],
>        'guid':None }]
>
> Problem is I get nothing ... yet when I do a search on freebase.org I
> get him front and center.
>
> http://www.freebase.com/search?limit=30&start=0&query=Bobby+L.+Rush
>
> Ideas on what I am doing wrong?  I tried using name as well as name~=
> ... same result, None.  I'm using the freebase python lib.
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