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Freebase: Is it worth it to base my company's entire database on it?

I'm with a company that is building a venue / artist database for live music and recently came across Freebase. It looks very compelling, even if the data isn't there for new, up-and-coming bands. For those of you who have worked with Freebase, I have a couple questions:

  1. Are there downsides to integrating all of the data entry with Freebase? We are not looking to sell or privatize this information.

  2. What are the weaknesses of Freebase, with regards to usability?

Solution

  • Disclosure: I work on Freebase at Google.

    The music data in Freebase is one of our strongest areas and is going to continue to get broader and richer as we continue to load more datasets. For example, we import data from MusicBrainz, clean it up and match the topics against existing topics in Freebase to avoid duplicates.

    1. In terms of downsides, you should be prepared to work with a lot of data. For example, Freebase currently has 4 musical artists named "John Smith" which may or may not be useful for your application but you'll still need to figure out which one(s) map to the John Smith that your users are interested in. We call this "reconciliation" and its necessary so that your app knows precisely which topics to query the API for.

      Since you mentioned music venues I should also point out that while Freebase has a lot of data about places, we don't yet have a geosearch API so you'd need to roll your own if that's something you need.

      Since anyone can edit Freebase, you should also consider using as_of_time to protect your site against vandalism.

    2. Freebase is great for developers because you can easily jump in and clean up bad data or add missing topics. However, one area that has always been a challenge is loading large amounts of data from outside of Google. We've built the OpenRefine which allows folks to upload datasets, but these datasets must pass a QA process that takes some time to complete. Its necessary to have these QA processes to maintain the level of quality in Freebase, but it does slow down the process of loading large datasets.

    I really hope that you choose to make use of Freebase music data to build your company. I know that there are already a number of music startups happily using our data.