So long and thanks for all the data!

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Jason Douglas

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May 2, 2016, 2:08:38 PM5/2/16
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Today we will shut down freebase.com and the Freebase APIs. This is later than originally announced [1], but the launch of the KG Search API [2] also took longer than anticipated. 

The Freebase data was openly licensed and belongs to all of us, so we'll be leaving the data dumps available indefinitely. In addition to the last regular data dump that's been available ever since Freebase went read only [3], we've added a complete final graphd dump that includes all of the tuple metadata for anyone who really wants a forensic challenge [4]. If you have no idea what graphd tuples are, you probably shouldn't bother looking at it. ;-)

It was fun! And to keep contributing to open knowledge bases, remember to check out Wikidata (wikidata.org)!

- Google Knowledge Graph Team

guid - The 128-bit guid of the primitive, rendered as a 32-byte hex string.
typeguid - The guid of the primitive's type if it is an edge (the predicate in RDF terms). If empty, the primitive represents a node in the graph, rather than an edge.
left - The guid of the primitive's left-hand side (the subject in RDF terms).
right  - The guid of the primitive's right-hand side (the object in RDF terms).
value - The literal value of the primitive. Only a few edge types have both right and value values (e.g, /type/object/key, /type/object/name).
datatype -  The type of the value, when present. One of: string | boolean | integer | float | timestamp | url | guid | bytestring.
scope  - The guid of the object whose permission was used to write the primitive (typically a user or attribution node).
timestamp - When the primitive was written, with16 bits of sub-second precision.
live - Whether the primitive was an assertion or deletion.
archival - not used
valuetype - not used
txstart - Signals the beginning of replication transaction
name - A few primitives are named so they can be directly accessed by system bootstrap code, starting with HAS_KEY.

Jarno van Driel

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May 3, 2016, 4:57:39 PM5/3/16
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I hope you can answer some questions :
  • Will Freebases MIDs 301 redirect to Wikidatas QIDs?
  • What should web developers do that maintain sites that contain structured data still referring to Freebase MIDs, is it OK to leave this structured data the way it is or should it be updated to QIDs?
    • And what to do if there are no equivalent QIDs?

Emery Mersich

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May 4, 2016, 1:28:52 PM5/4/16
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The graphd dump link doesn't seem to be working. Can you please take a look? Thanks!

Jason Douglas

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May 4, 2016, 1:34:37 PM5/4/16
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Oops -- the /rdf/ shouldn't be in the path. Sorry about that.

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 10:28 AM Emery Mersich <emer...@gmail.com> wrote:
The graphd dump link doesn't seem to be working. Can you please take a look? Thanks!

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Alan Bushnell

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May 4, 2016, 6:42:02 PM5/4/16
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  • Will Freebases MIDs 301 redirect to Wikidatas QIDs?
It appears the answer to this is "no".  Visiting any Freebase url redirects to https://developers.google.com/freebase
That page says Google's Freebase endpoints will go dark Aug 31 2016 
  • What should web developers do that maintain sites that contain structured data still referring to Freebase MIDs, is it OK to leave this structured data the way it is or should it be updated to QIDs?
As far as I've been able to figure out this will not be possible.  Wikidata has not completely mapped MIDs to available QIDs.  If they haven't mapped entities at this point the balance will be done manually or perhaps semi-manually, so it will take a very long time.  I believe this caught Google by surprise.

    • And what to do if there are no equivalent QIDs?

You can try querying the Google Knowledge Graph API but not all of the Freebase entities are exposed through that.

Personally, I am most curious what this means for the Youtube APIs which return Freebase ids, some of which are not in Knowledge Graph (or Wikidata).  Haven't heard any public statements by anyone so far about the effect on Youtube.
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