Extending Data From Freebase - tfmorris/OpenRefine GitHub Wiki

(WORK IN PROGRESS: additional feature documentation on this coming soon - Thanks to Tom Morris )

The Freebase graph stores many things, but 2 examples of useful data that are NOT stored in the graph are - text blurbs and photos.

You can get the text blurbs (topic descriptions) by fetching them from the Blob store using "Add column by fetching URL" but first you'll need the article ID.

Starting from your reconciled column, use "Add column from Freebase" and use the "Add a property" field at the top to add /common/topic/article. - using the new column, select "Add a column by fetching a URL" and construct the URL as follows: "http://api.freebase.com/api/trans/raw"+value - You'll end up with another new column containing the text of all the blurbs

You could do something similar using the property /common/topic/image to get the images associated with a topic, except that Refine doesn't store handle images as a native datatype, so the best you can do is construct the URLs that you'd use to fetch them

The API is documented at http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Trans_services if you want more information.

Note that both text blurbs and images typically have different licenses than the rest of Freebase data since they are often provided by Wikipedia (or other contributors).

If you need additional help with pulling in other Freebase properties or schema, then do not hesitate to ask us on the Refine mailing list.

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