My latest version of MapIt has a better GUI. Less black-magic going on now.
Try it (probably Firefox only for now)
Building a query:
origin of rivers + image
Resulting mashup
showing Freebase rivers on Google Earth
Example maps:
- Film actors – place of birth, film and part, image – 35 records
- Rivers – origin, image - 64 records
- People – place of birth, profession, image – 369 records
- Deceased People – place, date and cause of death, image – 39 records
- Literature Award Winners – image, award and year – 8 records
Let me know if you manage to build any interesting maps. Feedback and bug reports very welcome.
Hey Will, works great.
Maybe it’s good to mention people need to be logged in into Freebase to make it work.
At least that’s what I didn’t realise at first
Oh and there’s a typo in your title tag for the Mashup:
FreeBash -> Freebase
Important if you wanna be found by Google
When I said “works like a charm”, that was about your prepared queries.
I find it really hard to build meaningful queries though…
Some things I tried but I didn’t succeed:
capital cities,
parliaments,
museums,
Winter olympics locations…
The problem seems to be that types, where you really would expect a location field attached, do not have it… cities, buildings…
Oh btw: the application shows a flag also on the “image location” field, but that’s not what it is supposed to do is it?
Hi Pascal,
Thanks for the feedback. I added an error message with the Freebase log-in link and fixed the title.
If you make any cool maps then please do post them in the comments.
Companies by Place Founded – 63 records.
(You can use a href tags in the comments)
Step by Step example: capitals of the world
Think of an instance of a capital city*, let’s type ‘Berlin’
Click ‘Find topics’
The first topic shown looks like the one we want, so click it.
Expand ‘City/Town’
Add ‘Capital City Of’ to query by clicking its blue info icon
Make it required by clicking the check box
Add ‘Location’ to query by clicking on the flag icon
We are now ready to display a map, but we can improve the map with the following
Click on the label ‘Capital City Of’ and change it to ‘Country’
Expand ‘Topic’
Add ‘image’ to the query and make it required.
Change max results to ‘0′ (unlimited)
Click ‘MapIt’
(* If you start by searching for London or Paris, you can see that they have a user-added type of ‘Capital’. But unfortunately they are the only two instances, so it’s not useful for our query here)
Hi Pascal, hope my example helps.
> expect a location field attached, do not have it… cities, buildings…
My type hierarchy does not show co-types which does limit the possibilities. I’m working on this.
> the application shows a flag also on the “image location” field,
Image does actually have a valid Location field. I haven’t been able to use this for mapping though, I keep getting timeouts.
[...] MapIt – a Freebase Google Maps builder (updated) « HamsterSoup – Recipes for Geeks (tags: google) [...]
Ahhh… indeed!
The …
“Add ‘Capital City Of’ to query by clicking its blue info icon
Make it required by clicking the check box”
… wasn’t clear at all to me…
I do get a map of capital cities indeed now:
http://www.hamstersoup.com/freebase/projects/maps/MapIt/mapit.html?queryStr=%5B%7B++%22%2Fcommon%2Ftopic%2Fimage%22%3A%5B%7B++++%22guid%22%3Anull%2C++++%22limit%22%3A1%2C++++%22optional%22%3Afalse++%7D%5D%2C++%22%2Flocation%2Fcitytown%2Fcapital_city_of%22%3A%5B%7B++++%22limit%22%3A1%2C++++%22name%22%3Anull%2C++++%22optional%22%3Afalse++%7D%5D%2C++%22geolocation%22%3A%5B%7B++++%22latitude%22%3Anull%2C++++%22longitude%22%3Anull++%7D%5D%2C++%22id%22%3Anull%2C++%22limit%22%3A0%2C++%22name%22%3Anull%2C++%22type%22%3A%22%2Flocation%2Flocation%22%7D%5D&fieldStr=%7B%22Image%22%3A%7B%22label%22%3A%22image%22%2C%22ptr%22%3A%5B0%2C%22%2Fcommon%2Ftopic%2Fimage%22%2C0%5D%7D%2C%22Location%22%3A%7B%22label%22%3A%22Location%22%2C%22ptr%22%3A%5B0%2C%22geolocation%22%2C0%5D%7D%2C%22Name1%22%3A%7B%22label%22%3A%22Country%22%2C%22ptr%22%3A%5B0%2C%22%2Flocation%2Fcitytown%2Fcapital_city_of%22%2C0%5D%7D%7D
Hi Pascal, glad you got it to work. I clearly need to re-think the GUI though. I just hacked together the first thing that came to mind since I wanted to prove the concept of a query builder. But now I would like to make it more intuitive.
I still didn’t manage to get the other examples I thought would have been possible:
parliaments,
museums,
Winter olympics locations…
It would help if Addresses were “locatable” as well, but I guess you’ll have to work on the Google maps API side then?
hey will, i feel this is a really important app that should be running. need a programming friend? would love to help.
Thanks but we’re working on a much more powerful version of this. Stay tuned to the blog.freebase.com