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This looks incredibly promising

Thanks to a post by Skud, I’ve discovered Freebase, which is, as Skud described it, “crack for information nerds”. It appears to be exactly what I was hoping to develop or find for my aviation navigation data project - a flexible structured information agregator, almost like a wiki with user definable fields.

You probably can’t see much of it, because right now it’s in alpha and by invitation only, but so far they’ve imported all of Wikipedia and added some links between then, and people have written some demo applications.

Like many AJAX applications, it has a tendency to get the dreaded “a script on this page is running slowly”, but otherwise it’s pretty nifty.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 01:44 GMT and is filed under Flying, Nav Data, Revelation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “This looks incredibly promising”

  1. Kirrily Robert Says:
    August 21st, 2007 at 03:00 GMT

    Yes. YES YES YES. I’m utterly addicted.

  2. Frank Ch. Eigler Says:
    August 21st, 2007 at 13:24 GMT

    Is google base not an option?

  3. Kirrily Robert Says:
    August 21st, 2007 at 16:42 GMT

    Frank: check out this post, where one of the FB guys talks about the difference between GB and FB: http://roblog.freebase.com/?p=9

  4. Paul Tomblin Says:
    August 24th, 2007 at 17:13 GMT

    I just had a look at Google Base. The required attributes for every record are:
    * description
    * expiration_date
    * id
    * image_link
    * link
    * title
    Most of those have no relevance to me. And the only XML formats it accepts are RSS and Atom. Also, I don’t see any support for subordinate data, like a list of runways or communications frequencies.

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