FreebaseAt ISWC2008 Freebase released its new RDF service for generating RDF representations of Freebase topics, allowing Freebase to be used as Linked Data! To obtain the RDF data for a topic send a GET request to http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/some.topic.id where "some.topic.id" is replaced by the desired topic identifier (slashes in the identifier must be replaced by dots). Topic data can be represented as N3, RDF/XML or Turtle depending on the preferences expressed in your client's HTTP Accept header. Try it out with the Freebase topic Semantic Web.

You can also cater to clients that prefer HTML output by using the /ns end-point (http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/some.topic.id). The service performs the content negotiation automatically; delivering human-friendly HTML representations to Web browsers, and redirecting clients expecting RDF to the /rdf URL (via 302 redirect).

One downside is the data doesn't appear to link to external resources, in a sense walling itself in. It should be trivial to link the topics that came from Wikipedia back to Wikipedia as well as DBpedia (which would be killer, by the way).

About the author

James Simmons

It's my goal to help bring about the Semantic Web. I also like to explore related topics like natural language processing, information retrieval, and web evolution. I'm the primary author of Semantic Focus and I'm currently working on several Semantic Web projects.

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