Idle tinkering - products, barcodes, freebase & wikidi

A little bit more work was done on products.freebaseapps.com this weekend. Products.freebaseapps.com simply grabs all Consumer products and renders them out as RDFa - as good relations info.

I did a bit of work to make the site more human friendly and to encourage random users who come across it to start editing.

All of that done, I still can't for the life of me get the Google Rich Snippets tool to actually render anything happily. Couple that with a variety of RDFa validators and other tools being out of action/upset with the markup in a most confusing way; and you start to think this linked data stuff is tricky...

While testing  and pounding my head against a brick wall I did come across wikidi.

I explored a bit, but couldn't decide - the content they are providing is largely freebase sourced; but there has been other data integrated (ie: prices). It's under a creative commons licence, but there's no 'bulk download' or other functionality - so getting data back out usefully is difficult.
There's no RDF/RDFa or other structured markup either - so this site is a bit of a black hole. I'm not sure I like knowing my contributions to open data are going into a location like that.

Tomboy notes

I wish that I had a tomboy notes plugin which was like Zemanta; or could otherwise plug in freebase data.

Local Government Areas and IDs

The ABS have made their data creative commons; but it's still a pain to get to the data you want.

I'm trying to reconcile LGAs against our work application, freebase, and the census data - but it's a pain.

To make things a bit easier for others treading this path, here's a spreadsheet of LGAs and ABS ids for them, 2006

I'm a research subject

Check out The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Human Computation Engine, figure 4.

This application alone received more than 1 million contributions over 14 months with the top contributor casting more than 120k judgments and the top 10 contributors casting half of the total judgments.

Beats the heck out of medical research!

ANZAC day, freebase

If you've got a freebase account, help add details to WWI soldiers.

FOAF from Freebase

I made a quick FOAF from Freebase application.

Here's mine.

You just pass in an ID and out comes RDF/XML. It's limited to things typed as people.

This will help mend the gap between freebase RDF and common vocabularies, and was pretty easy to do - what other RDF vocabularies exist out there which would be nice to map onto freebase?

Songbird webpage api, bits, pieces, and notes

Imagine this scenario:

You are using your media player/browser, and you stumble across a track on a webpage. You preview it. You like it. There's no information on the webpage about where it's from, but luckily, the mp3 is tagged correctly.

You hit a button on your media browser, and bam! You can find popularity information on Last.fm, prices on Amazon, full album information on Musicbrainz. Last.fm suggests a similar artist. The process rinses and repeats. You get to stuff yourself full of delicious music.

To see (some of) this in action; fire up Songbird 0.3 or greater, play some tunes, and go explore.

Last.fm's API is being used to render information that the page asked songbird about.
Sweet.

Look at the code underneath: simple javascript. More about songbird's webpage api. That's pretty easy looking.


Other notes and odds and ends:
Songbird now takes regular firefox extensions, (say hello to greasemonkey) and Freebase is awesome.

Basically: Freebase has an API, it's got data from wikipedia, and you can do things like search for episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Or shows produced by JJ Abrahams.

So, mix the power of Songbird's webpage api with the vast data of wikipedia/freebase, sprinkle in a few applications, and you've got something far more fun looking than a simple google maps mashup.

Throw in greasemonkey and operator, and you can scrape information from pages into microformats. Then export them.