New EXPERIMENTAL Freebase Reconciliation Service

Tom Morris

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Feb 28, 2013, 12:01:37 AM2/28/13

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As some of you have noticed, reconciliation against Freebase, one of Refine's most awesome (among many awesome) features, has gone to hell in a handbasket recently. (In other words, it no longer works).

We weren't really counting on having to transition on a moment's notice, but I've patched together an *experimental* service which will hopefully help bridge the gap.

The new service is at: http://reconcile.freebaseapps.com/reconcile

You should be able to add it as a standard reconciliation service in either Google Refine 2.5 or OpenRefine (soon to be) 2.6 (aka the current development version)..

The new service is intended to be API compatible with the old service, but it doesn't use any of the old Freebase APIs with their consequent performance issues. It should be 10x (at least!) faster.

Having said that, it's not without issues. I coded it up in a hurry to bridge the gap. It's untested. It's got some known issues.

*IN PARTICULAR*, it has a hard filter on the type that you're reconciling against. There's a fix in the pipe for this, but in the mean time, if you're not sure that all of your candidates are, say, /people/person you should instead reconcile against /common/topic.

On the plus side, our previous warnings about not including additional columns in your reconciliation no long apply. If you want to include the person's birth date, death date, whatever, ..., you won't get vectored off to the land of the 18 month stale indexes.

I'm going to continue to tweak this over the next few days, but I'll try to make sure that the published version doesn't break. If you run into any problems, please file a bug report on Github.

Sorry about the recent instabilities in this space!

Tom

Nuno Bettencourt

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Feb 28, 2013, 7:54:21 AM2/28/13

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Hi Tom,

regarding this email, I've noticed the following.

On 28/02/2013, at 05:01, Tom Morris <tfmo...@gmail.com> wrote:

The new service is intended to be API compatible with the old service, but it doesn't use any of the old Freebase APIs with their consequent performance issues. It should be 10x (at least!) faster.

Having said that, it's not without issues. I coded it up in a hurry to bridge the gap. It's untested. It's got some known issues.

*IN PARTICULAR*, it has a hard filter on the type that you're reconciling against. There's a fix in the pipe for this, but in the mean time, if you're not sure that all of your candidates are, say, /people/person you should instead reconcile against /common/topic.

I've been using reconcile specifically against items from the /music/genre type.

Nevertheless, results differ from the first service to this new service.

For example, when reconciling the term "hiphop" using the old freebaseapp, I would get the following candidates:

Hip hop music (76) type: [ "/common/topic", "/broadcast/genre", "/broadcast/radio_format", "/base/socialdance/topic", "/base/christianrapmusic/topic", "/base/radiostations/radio_station_format", "/music/genre", "/award/award_discipline", "/film/film_subject", "/book/book_subject", "/base/arasmuzic/topic", "/base/papoiteskingboys/topic", "/freebase/task", "/base/choppedandscrewedmusic/topic", "/music/compositional_form", "/tv/tv_subject", "/base/webvideo/topic", "/media_common/media_genre", "/base/webvideo/internet_video_genre", "/music/music_video_genre" ]

Underground hip hop (50) type: [ "/music/genre" ]

Alternative hip hop (50) type: [ "/music/genre" ]

With the new service I get the following candidates:

Adverse (0.013) type: [ "/m/0hpcdn2" ] (comment: this should not be a type)

Anthony Ian Berkeley (0.006) type: [ "/m/0hpcdn2" ] (comment: this should not be a type)

Hip Hop is Dead (0.005) type: [ "/music/album" ] (comment: this is a type, but not of type /music/genre, which I asked for)

As a result, I guess the results should be same, independently of the service being used (in this particular matter); that the service is not reconciling against the specified type and even returning results from other types.

If you need any more information, I'm glad to help in whatever I can, because the old service it taking too long to reconcile my whole batch.

Best regards,

Nuno Bettencourt

Tom Morris

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Feb 28, 2013, 4:23:03 PM2/28/13

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Hi Nuno,

Thanks for the testing and feedback. That's definitely not a good result! When I was testing yesterday, things were being overly constrained and now it seems like they've gone the opposite direction.

This is built on some new backend Google services which are still being fine tuned and I heavily modified the old reconciliation service, so there are likely bugs in both pieces. That's why I labeled it experimental :-). Having said that, the results for this query are much worse than I'd expect.

For simple queries like this, I'd actually just like to use the Search API, but there are some technical limitations to doing multiple search queries in a batch, which is what we'd like to do here.

I'll see what I can do to improve things and report back to the list.

Tom

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Will

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Mar 21, 2013, 3:42:54 PM3/21/13

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Tom, I successfully added this to my G-Refine 2.5 and it seems running well. I have a set of titles I want to load to a single author and I put the FreebaseID in the Author column ... this used to recon quickly, can this new service snap fbids?

Tom Morris

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May 9, 2013, 4:47:11 PM5/9/13

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Will - I apologize for missing your question when it was originally posted! For the benefit of the archives and anyone else who's wondering (including you, if you didn't already figure it out):

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Will <wdsn...@gmail.com> wrote:

Tom, I successfully added this to my G-Refine 2.5 and it seems running well. I have a set of titles I want to load to a single author and I put the FreebaseID in the Author column ... this used to recon quickly, can this new service snap fbids?

The best way to reconcile Freebase IDs as well as other strong identifiers from Wikipedia, IMDB, the Library of Congress, etc is to use the very first service in the reconciliation dialog which is called something like "Query-based Freebase reconciliation." The default is to reconcile Freebase identifiers, but it can also lookup keys in any other namespace. For example, The namespace /wikipedia/en contains keys which are based on the URL of English Wikipedia articles and /wikipedia/en_id contains keys which are the numeric article numbers of Wikipedia articles.

There are lots of other interesting namespaces in the tree rooted at /authority.

Tom

Will

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May 21, 2013, 2:44:18 PM5/21/13

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Tom - thanks for the kind reply about "Query-based Freebase reconciliation" Is it still working? This worked great a month ago but today trying to use this service to Reconcile a column of fbids does not recon.

Tom Morris

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May 21, 2013, 7:32:41 PM5/21/13

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Hi Will. I think perhaps the old reconciliation service has stopped working. I'll try to write up directions tonight on installing the new reconcilation service so that it does query based lookups as well.

Tom

Thad Guidry

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May 21, 2013, 9:01:41 PM5/21/13

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Much appreciated ,Tom. I would like to see that write up as well.

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-Thad
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry

Tom Morris

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May 24, 2013, 5:41:30 PM5/24/13

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Sorry for the delay. It wasn't where I thought it was and it took me a little while to find the time to really dig into it.

The bad news is that the "Freebase Query-based Reconciliation" isn't a real reconciliation service but is instead implemented as part of the Freebase extension that we bundled with Google Refine 2.5. Sorry about that!

I'll look into tweaking the existing reconciliation service or creating a new one that'll do the job, but since other stuff like Add Column from Freebase is broken, it might be better to just focus on getting a release out the door.

Anyone want to donate a Mac for kit builds? :-)

Tom

Thad Guidry

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Aug 3, 2013, 10:32:47 AM8/3/13

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Tom,

What's the status now on the Reconcile feature in 2.6 , if I add the new service endpoint as a Standard Service ? I was able to see it auto hint for a Type in my column of musical artists... but when I tried to launch the reconcile...there was no spinner along the top banner and all I got in console was:

refine] POST /command/core/reconcile (20075ms)

-Thad
Thad on Freebase.com

Thad on LinkedIn

Tom Morris

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Aug 3, 2013, 1:16:36 PM8/3/13

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That's a bug introduced with the new internationalization code and isn't related to the recon service. Please file a bug report.

One loose end for 2,6 though is that I don't think we automatically upgrade existing recon service entries to get rid of the old (non-functional) recon service and replace it with the new one. The list is stored in the workspace data, so although new users will get pointed to the new service, users who are upgrading will currently need to add the new service manually. I'll look into improving this.

Tom

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Tom Morris

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Aug 6, 2013, 5:00:34 PM8/6/13

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I've rolled out some improvements to the new reconciliation service. It should perform give more reasonable type guesses for your columns now and it should also return the types for reconciliation candidates so that you can use the "Facet by best types match" facet among other things.

Previously we were using the "notable" properties, but this isn't guaranteed to return an actual type. You might get the "Horror film" genre as the most notable, instead of the Film (/film/film) type.

This works with both Refine 2.5 and Refine 2.6 (which should have beta kits available in the next day or two -- thanks to our alpha testers).

Tom

Thad Guidry

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Aug 6, 2013, 5:19:48 PM8/6/13

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Tom,

What is still "TODO" for the EXPERIMENTAL Reconcile Service ?

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Tom Morris

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Aug 6, 2013, 5:40:35 PM8/6/13

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On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Thad Guidry <thadg...@gmail.com> wrote:

What is still "TODO" for the EXPERIMENTAL Reconcile Service ?

There aren't really any open issues that I'm aware of for our implementation, but we'll be tracking changes to the underlying service and providing feedback to the Google engineers on ways it could be improved.

One of the reasons it was experimental when I first announced it is that the underlying Freebase API was unannounced and we were using it as part of the trusted tester program. Now the service is, if not announced, at least publicly documented: https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/reconciliation-overview

Having said that, it's still early days for the new service, so I suspect there will be various hiccups. If it doesn't work the way you think it should, please open issues in the issue database and provide example data. We'll collate all the bug reports and synthesize aggregate issues for the upstream developers.

Tom

Thad Guidry

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Aug 6, 2013, 6:13:12 PM8/6/13

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Sounds like a plan Tom. I'll try to get some more testing in on Trunk for the reconcile service.

Thanks for all your efforts !

Thad Guidry

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Sep 16, 2013, 4:47:18 PM9/16/13

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Hey Tom,

Is this a bug ? or is the service down ? Doesn't appear so, I can reach it on the Google Chrome browser with this URL : http://reconcile.freebaseapps.com/reconcile

which is what I used to Add as a Standard Service... but then get the error in OpenRefine console (with just a forever WORKING... spinner on the gui)

15:24:38.163 [ refine] POST /command/core/get-rows (7ms)

15:24:42.244 [ refine] POST /command/core/importing-controller (4081ms)

15:24:43.253 [ refine] POST /command/core/get-importing-job-status (1009ms)

15:24:43.258 [ refine] POST /command/core/cancel-importing-job (5ms)

15:24:43.722 [ refine] POST /command/core/load-language (464ms)

15:24:43.737 [ refine] GET /command/core/get-preference (15ms)

15:24:43.743 [ refine] GET /command/core/get-preference (6ms)

15:24:43.747 [ refine] POST /command/core/load-language (4ms)

15:24:43.754 [ refine] POST /command/core/load-language (7ms)

15:24:43.790 [ refine] GET /command/core/get-project-metadata (36ms)

15:24:43.896 [ refine] GET /command/core/get-models (106ms)

15:24:43.951 [ refine] GET /command/core/get-history (55ms)

15:24:43.953 [ refine] POST /command/core/get-rows (2ms)

15:24:53.725 [ refine] POST /command/core/guess-types-of-column (9772ms)

15:25:14.946 [ command] Failed to guess cell types for load

{"q0":{"query":"Think","limit":3},"q1":{"query":"50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True","limit":3},"q2":{"query":"Bullspotting","limit":3},"q3":{"query"

:"Believing Bullshit","limit":3},"q4":{"query":"How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass","limit":3},"q5":{"query":"When Good Thinking Goes Bad","limit":3},"

q6":{"query":"The Art of Deception","limit":3},"q7":{"query":"Don\u2019t Believe Everything You Think","limit":3},"q8":{"query":"Truth, Knowledge, Or Just Plain

Bull","limit":3},"q9":{"query":"Hoaxes, Myths, and Mayhem","limit":3}} (21221ms)

java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect

at java.net.DualStackPlainSocketImpl.waitForConnect(Native Method)

at java.net.DualStackPlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(DualStackPlainSocketImpl.java:85)

at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:339)

at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:200)

at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:182)

at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:172)

at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:392)

at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:579)

at sun.net.NetworkClient.doConnect(NetworkClient.java:175)

at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.openServer(HttpClient.java:378)

at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.openServer(HttpClient.java:473)

at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.<init>(HttpClient.java:203)

at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.New(HttpClient.java:290)

at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.New(HttpClient.java:306)

at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getNewHttpClient(HttpURLConnection.java:995)

at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.plainConnect(HttpURLConnection.java:931)

at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.connect(HttpURLConnection.java:849)

at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getOutputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1090)

at com.google.refine.commands.recon.GuessTypesOfColumnCommand.guessTypes(GuessTypesOfColumnCommand.java:174)

at com.google.refine.commands.recon.GuessTypesOfColumnCommand.doPost(GuessTypesOfColumnCommand.java:89)

at com.google.refine.RefineServlet.service(RefineServlet.java:177)

at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:820)

at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:511)

at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166)

at org.mortbay.servlet.UserAgentFilter.doFilter(UserAgentFilter.java:81)

at org.mortbay.servlet.GzipFilter.doFilter(GzipFilter.java:132)

at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)

at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388)

at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216)

at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182)

at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765)

at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418)

at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152)

at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326)

at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542)

at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.headerComplete(HttpConnection.java:923)

at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:547)

at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:212)

at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404)

at org.mortbay.jetty.bio.SocketConnector$Connection.run(SocketConnector.java:228)

at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1145)

at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:615)

at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:724)

15:25:14.960 [ command] Exception caught (14ms)