Oops, forgot to blog about this! Though if you’re following us on Twitter you’ll already know about it.

This Wednesday, Feb 10th, is the second Wednesday of the month which means it’s time for the monthly SF Freebase meetup. This month our talks include:

• A new Freebase plugin for Wordpress
• Using machine learning techniques to type topics in Freebase
• Reconciling Wordnet data with topics in Freebase
• Connecting open government data (especially Recovery Act data) with Freebase

As usual there’ll be pizza, beer, wifi, and time for general Q&A/demos/hacking.

RSVP on the meetup page.

Just a heads-up for those who aren’t on the freebase-discuss mailing list. These two libraries were both announced on the list on Friday.

First up, R. Morgan announced announced a beta release of phpFreebase library.

I just wanted to inform the group that a beta release ver.: 0.6.0 of phpFreebase has been released and the project is now hosted on SourceForge.net at: http://phpfreebase.sourceforge.net

The library will currently allow querying of the Freebase system. I will soon be adding write operations and cleaning up the code. This is the first release of the php class library code so many changes may be made between this and the first release version 1.0.0.

Shawn Simister also posted his Java API and power tools:

The Java API currently supports reads and writes through the Freebase API. MQL queries can be loaded from files and parameterized for both read and writes. Cursors are also supported but error handling still needs some work.

The Power Tools project contains a collection of cross-platform, command-line tools that I’ve built to help me work with large data sets. Most notably, it includes my spreadsheet loader which allows you to map spreadsheet columns to MQL parameters and upload complex data sets.

More information about libraries and tools for various languages can be found on the Freebase documentation wiki.

Another set of slides from a recent SF Freebase meetup. Back in December, Alec presented his work on an Objective C Freebase library and an iPhone app to help people add pictures to Freebase topics that are located near them.

Here’s the slide deck from Alec’s talk:

You can also check out the Objective C Freebase library at Google Code. The iPhone app itself is, I believe, forthcoming.

Also, a reminder that meetups are held on the second Wednesday of each month at Freebase HQ in San Francisco. Join our meetup group.

Last night Will Moffat gave a talk at the San Francisco Javascript meetup on the topic of Acre, Freebase’s server-side javascript platform. He’s just posted his slides, so here they are:

Meetup in San Francisco next Wednesday

A reminder that we have a meetup happening in San Francisco next Wednesday, December 9th, at Freebase HQ. We have three talks lined up:

1. Alec Flett will talk about an iPhone app using Freebase’s geodata to encourage photo contributions
2. Arthur van Hoff will demo the Ellerdale Project, a new website mashing up Freebase with realtime data streams
3. I’ll talk about guessing people’s gender based on Freebase’s data about given names

Details at meetup.com — please RSVP there!

Community meeting next Monday

Next Monday is the first one of the month so our regular internal Monday community meeting will be open to all via Skype.

When: 2:30pm PST (GMT-8), Monday December 7th

Where: Metaweb, 631 Howard St, 4th floor, San Francisco

RSVP: Please email kirrily@metaweb.com before 2pm Monday if you plan to attend corporeally or digitally (and provide your Skype username in the latter case).

More details at Community meeting via Skype on our wiki, or see the agenda.

NY workshop is full

Our full-day workshop in New York has filled up quickly, and we have no more open slots for general signup. However, if we get any dropouts we’ll be sure to let you know! If you’d like to be put on a waiting list, please email Robert.