With Freebase you can do amazing queries that would be impossible with Google or the Wikipedia. As Jan commented on my BrusselsBarcamp talk, you could “Look for actors from Ghent who were born between 1970 and 1999“.
Well let’s give it a shot. Here’s the Javascript query to do just that:
{
"query":[{
"a:type":"/tv/tv_actor",
"date_of_birth":null,
"date_of_birth=":"1970",
"name":null,
"place_of_birth":"Ghent",
"type":"/people/person"
}]
}
(Drum roll please …) and here are the results:
{
"result":[],
"status":"/mql/status/ok"
}
Nada. There ain’t no data in Freebase on Belgian actors from Ghent in their twenties 
And that’s the frustrating thing about Freebase. The data just isn’t there yet and it’s going to take a massive amount of data-entry to fulfill it’s promise. On the positive side, their API allows write access and there are a lot of open data sources out there so at least it doesn’t all have to be entered manually.
( … a few minutes pass while Will does some manual data-entry … )
Let’s re-run that same query:
{
"result":[{
"a:type":"/tv/tv_actor",
"date_of_birth":"1970-06-19",
"name":"Franky Lanckacker",
"place_of_birth":"Ghent",
"type":"/people/person"
},{
"a:type":"/tv/tv_actor",
"date_of_birth":"1972",
"name":"Miguel Wiels",
"place_of_birth":"Ghent",
"type":"/people/person"
}],
"status":"/mql/status/ok"
}
Now the world knows about Franky Lanckacker and Miguel Wiels 
Freebase is an exciting idea and it may well be the next big thing, but it’s got to reach critical mass in terms of data and users to become really useful.
- PS I cheated a little, Jan originally said 1980 (rather than 1970) but I just couldn’t find Ghent actors under 27 on the internet.
- PPS Updated: Improved query as per Daniel’s suggestion below. (I couldn’t figure out how to constrain to type person AND type tv_actor)
Posted by Will Moffat 
