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.
Yes. YES YES YES. I’m utterly addicted.
Is google base not an option?
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
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.