Freebase Parallax, I am impressed
Well if you asked me what application impressed me the most so far in 2008, I would answer without any hesitation Parallax. Parallax is a browsing interface for the knowledge base Freebase. It helps you generate complex semantic queries without even knowing you are doing so. Go to see the video ; no it was not produced by Steven Spielberg, you can use it, it’s real !
I tried it myself to answer this : What are the all the currencies used in the French islands ? (héhé I am particularly interested in that one since I am from New-Caledonia)
First I could have all French islands on a map, and embed it here:
Then I could drill to the currencies of those islands and have their thumbnails:
This is almost the right result. I had to look for islands where French is spoken instead of French islands, which is a bit different. I had to do this because French islands set was reduced to New-Caledonia (what about La Réunion or Guadeloupe ?).
So on that little example I was able to answer my question very quickly and have the results presented in a very meaningful way (thumbnails of the notes and coins, islands placed on a map). The only drawback comes from the content itself. While it is very well structured, there are not as many french islands documented as in Wikipedia.
While Freebase claims to have 4,128,404 subjects documented versus Wikipedia’s 2,533,910, this has to be taken carefully. Freebase has a lot of articles coming directly from Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia articles are usually much richer than Freebase’s.
Anyway, thumbs up for all contributors of those bases ! It is really impressive and somewhat amazing to see those free contributions, particularly when opposed to other models (like Knol’s AdSense based model).
Maz @ August 27, 2008