Just saw on Stefano’s Linotype that social datbase Freebase launched a version 4.0. I think Stefano does a better job marketing the redesign than the official Freebase blog. The positives he cites:
- reducing data agoraphobia
- one size does not fit all
- increasing relational density
I really want to be excited about Freebase, especially given the cool interface work that David Huynh is doing there. But I just don’t get it. Is there anyone here who has drank the kool-aid and can explain it to me?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Daniel Lemire // Oct 31, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I wrote something just like it with a post-doc, except that it uses only tag clouds. I even made a paper out of it:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.2156
I bet they share a lot of my intuition, so maybe the intro. of my paper could help you.
Their design however has one fundamental difference: they use “selection queries” (which architects did this) and they do not have much support for fancier aggregates and clustering… which we worked on.
2 Freebase Parallax // Dec 3, 2008 at 12:11 am
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