David’s just announced the release of Google Refine 2.0 (previously known as Freebase Gridworks) over on the Google Open Source blog:

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions.

Freebase Gridworks 1.0 has already been well received by the data journalism and open government data communities (you can read how the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica and data.gov.uk have used it) and we are very excited by what they and others will be able to do with this new release.

Check out the post and the screencasts on Youtube: one, two, three.

For those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area, David will be demoing Google Refine 2.0 at tonight’s San Francisco Freebase meetup. Be sure to RSVP if you’d like to attend!

This is a guest post from Shawn Simister, one of the Freebase Experts group, who attended HackTO last weekend in Toronto, Canada as Freebase’s representative.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of presenting the Freebase API at the HackTO event in Toronto. For those unfamiliar with this type of event, its basically a day of intense hacking where programmers get together, learn new skills and try to build cool apps all in a single day. Freebase was one of 6 APIs which were presented in short 5 minute pitches after which the participants got 30 minutes to brainstorm ideas and form teams. Once the teams were formed the real learning began. People jumped in and started playing with the API and quickly discovered many of the strengths and weaknesses of the Freebase API. It was really cool to have people come up to me with an idea and see the look on their face when I showed them how to pull the data they needed out of Freebase using the query editor. I found it interesting to see how quickly they picked up the basic concepts and moved from understanding what a graph of entities was to learning how to do basic reconciliation using the search API (a surprisingly frequent request).

A common first impression seemed to be that Freebase looked really cool but that there was a lot to absorb at all once and many people weren’t sure where to start. After my experiences this weekend, I’m even more convinced that the best way to address this is to just sit down with someone and help walk them through their problem from the perspective of a Freebase expert. It’s so much easier to understand the difference between ids, keys, types, and properties when you can see it explained in the context of a problem that you’re trying to solve. As an expert this often means repeating many of the same basic concepts over and over but I think the end result is a much deeper understanding of how Freebase concepts are applied to real world problems.

By the end of the day, there were 17 teams with apps to demo; 5 of them using the Freebase API. Only one other API (OANDA) had that many apps. Although none of the Freebase apps placed in the top 3, they were all well received and I heard afterwards from the judges that some of them were very close.

These are the apps that were built using the Freebase API (sorry no URLs yet):

• SuperTwit – used the Cadmus & Freebase API to tweet out the ages of people from your top conversations.
• Trendeme – took the top trending words from Twitter to figure out if your friends tweet interesting things (used the Freebase API)
• What To Do – looked up where you are and gave you suggestions of where to go (used the Yellowpages & Freebase API)
• MediaGorge – applied the 4Square check-in concept to books, movies etc. using the Freebase API.
• Multiplayer Online Trivia – pulled in a list of movies from Freebase API and made a trivia game by guessing multiple choice questions.

All in all, I think it’s a net benefit to the community to have more people developing apps based on Freebase data since each new Freebase developer becomes one more person with a vested interest in the depth and quality of Freebase data. I hope that through more events like HackTO we can continue to grow the community and make Freebase an even more powerful resource for everyone to use.

Shawn

Thanks Shawn, and thanks to all the hackers at HackTO. If you are having a Hack Day or other event and would like Freebase to be part of it, please contact us!

Some time ago, we introduced the idea of Machine IDs (MIDs) to Freebase. MIDs are short identifiers that have a number of advantages over the GUIDs that we had been using for years. Most importantly, they are more stable, and better for storing offline (outside of Freebase itself).

We’ve been encouraging developers to use MIDs for some time now, but our own data dumps had not kept up with the times. The good news is, as of Friday October 13th (just over six weeks from now) our data dumps will start using MIDs instead of GUIDs. This will apply to all formats of our dumps — the TSV, link export, and simple topic formats. The not-so-good news is, if you are using our data dumps you may need to modify your code to deal with it. However, we believe that the benefits of MIDs will outweigh the disadvantages of this change.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know, by commenting here or on the freebase-discuss mailing list.

We first launched Acre, the hosted, server-side JavaScript platform behind Freebase Apps, just over a year ago. Since then it’s become more and more important to us and to the Freebase community. Not only are all kinds of individual developers and businesses using Acre to build apps and integrate Freebase data into their own platforms, but we’ve also recently announced our intention to develop the Freebase.com site on the platform, too.

Until now, Acre development has always been tied to Freebase.com, meaning that you need to develop your Acre apps on our server, using our app editor. But we know that most software developers prefer to use their own native development environments — their favourite text editor, version control system, and so on — so lately we’ve been working on ways to make Acre work with source code that’s not stored in Freebase.

Today we’re pleased to announce that we’re releasing the Acre platform as open source software. This means that you can run Acre on your own machine, pulling templates and other files from your local disk and using your own development environment. While Acre still has close ties to Freebase (such as API hooks for easily making Freebase queries), this also means that you’ll be able to develop standalone, non-Freebase apps using the platform if you want. And, by running Acre on your own platform, you can avoid the resource limitations that are necessary in a shared environment.

If you’re interested in server-side JavaScript platforms, you may also be interested in some of the technical details of Acre.

• Acre is based on Rhino, Mozilla’s implementation of Javascript in Java. (In fact, “Acre” stands for “A Crash of Rhinos Evaluating”.) Acre, by default, uses the Jetty servlet engine as its HTTP server, but can be run in any servlet container.
• Acre includes a module system which supports high-latency source retrieval using extensive caching. Although Acre was originally designed to fetch data only from Freebase itself, it can fetch data from disk and will support a wider range of require() options such as WebDAV.
• Acre is capable of running on Google AppEngine, with support for synchronous and asynchronous HTTP requests, and the Keystore. Soon, Freebase’s own Acre installation will run on AppEngine.

Please download Acre and try it out, and let us know what you think!

We’ve been running monthly Freebase meetups in San Francisco for some time now. This month’s is going to be our first one as part of Google. We’d like to extend an invitation to anyone who’s interested in Freebase — whether as a software developer, a data contributor or user, or an open data/open source software afficionado — to come hear about Freebase, what we’re doing, how to use our platform, and how others are using our data and entities for research, building apps, and more.

This month’s meetup will be held at Google’s San Francisco offices, at 345 Spear St near the Embarcadero. Full address and instructions are given on the registration page (linked below).

Along with a new venue, we also have a new schedule. The meetup will begin at 5:30pm with technical presentations, including:

• Freebase platform overview
• Short tech talks about specific Freebase features
• Previews of what’s in store for Freebase in the near future
• Q&A

Then from 7pm onwards, we’ll adjourn to Gordon Biersch downstairs and kick on with an informal social gathering for Freebase developers and anyone else who’s interested. Both the tech talk space and Gordon Biersch have wifi, so bring your laptops.

For full details and to register, go to meetup.com/sf-freebase/ It’s vital that you RSVP for this event, as building security will have a list of attendees and will only let in those who are on the list. (No RSVP is required for the social gathering at Gordon Biersch, however.)

See you there!