It’s just over a week til Hack Day and we’re counting down the days. You can still register but remember, spaces are limited, and we expect them to fill up before the day. (Last time round, we had to cap attendance to avoid over-crowding.)

We have a lot planned for Hack Day! For instance:

Releases

Our product team are working like mad to get a bunch of developer tools updated and released for Hack Day. They include:

• Acre version 1.0 and an updated developer hub and app directory.
• Freebase Suggest 2.0 — an improved version of our Freebase-powered suggest/autocomplete jQuery widget
• Mjt 0.9 — I hear rumours that there’s a major update to Mjt in the wings
• freebase-python — significant updates to our library for Python developers to talk to Freebase

Experimental

We have a few experimental projects we’ll be presenting, too.

One is MQL Extensions, which allow you to extend MQL to mash up against other services. We demoed this at the Palo Alto Semantic Web gathering a while back, showing a mashup between Freebase, Twitter, and last.fm done entirely within a MQL query.

The next is our improved reconciliation service and (highly experimental) spreadsheet loader. Though this won’t be ready for general use by Hack Day, we are hoping to be able to demo it.

Unconference talks

Our unconference format means that anyone and everyone is welcome to grab a room, a whiteboard, and a projector and talk about any Freebase-related subject that interests them. Last year we had talks on everything from schema for music and recordings, to geodata, to using the Freebase data dumps.

If you’ve got a subject you’d like to talk about, this will be a great chance. Some of the talks I’ve heard mentioned in advance include:

• MQL Boot Camp — a crash course in querying Freebase’s structured data
• How Will helped the Wall Street Journal embed Freebase data on their movie reviews pages
• Data games: how to make contributing to Freebase easy and fun
• Freebase and the Semantic Web: linked open data, Common Tag, and more.

Projects

Last year, we found a lot of people were interested in hacking on/with Freebase but didn’t have any particular project in mind. This year, we’re providing a little more structure. Brian Karlak is helping to organise projects in advance. He writes:

Do you have something you’ve been itching to see implemented in Freebase? Perhaps it’s an Acre app that shows off your favorite domain in an entirely new light, or a semantic mashup that opens up a world of new possibilities. Maybe you have a cool data set that you’ve been waiting to load. There are all sorts of possibilities — Games With A Purpose, Social Apps — you name it!

If you have a project that you’d like to work on, please let us know about it! Go over to the 2009 Hack Day Project Base and enter a brief description of your idea, along with a rough breakdown of what needs to be done to bring it to fruition. We’ll help you get prepped up beforehand, and on Freebase Hack Day, we’ll give you an opportunity to pitch your idea to the attendees and find people to help you hack on it.

BTW, the best projects are ones that:

1) have a clear short-term goal (eg working prototype, data load) that has a reasonable chance of being completed in a day
2) require a cross section of skills (data wizard, l33t c0ding skillz in Python or JavaScript, web artiste, etc)
3) have clear places where 2-3 people could help out

So, if you have an idea — let us know about it! To help us make sure that you have everything you need, we’re asking that you send in your submissions by Tuesday, 7/7.

Tell your friends

Please help us spread the word about Hack Day. If you know a venue where we should publicise it, let us know! You can also blog about it, tweet, or just drop an email to any friends or colleagues you think might be interested.

And while I’m reposting things from the dev list, Viral just announced that new data dumps are available from download.freebase.com. This includes all the facts in Freebase in two different formats, plus our Wikipedia Extract.

Stefano writes on our developer mailing list:

If you’re like me, MQL often feels like a combination of power and dark magic: some people can whip up a MQL query in no time, like they knew all about every type, every property and how they link all the various pieces of the graph together.

Asking around how people did it, yielded several strategies… but many basically revolved around using the ‘explore pages’ (those magically revealed by hitting the F8 key on freebase.com).

Then David wrote the new query editor, with the amazing context completion and I thought I was set… but while my MQL mojo improved a lot with it, it always felt like something was missing: if I knew the type I wanted, I could get started… but what if I didn’t know where to start? what if I didn’t know how to construct the query and I needed some guidance in navigating how the types were all connected together? (especially with CVTs and whatnot)

I felt like I was in a fog and with no map: finding my way out felt tentative at best, frustrating at worst.

The Jason showed me an acre app he had written a long time ago and that he uses all the time that offered a browsable interface to all the freebase domains, types and properties, their IDs… and how they all connect together.

I had found my map.

Unfortunately, while extremely useful already, the schema explorer app needed some love… so I decided to give it some and the result has been so successful internally that I’m happy to announce it to the public so that everybody can benefit from it. Find it at: http://schemas.freebaseapps.com/

I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do.

NOTES:

1) suggestions/criticism/feature-requests appreciated and welcome

2) this is an acre app and if you’re curious (or interested in forking it) you can find it at: http://acre.freebase.com/#app=/user/jdouglas/schemas

3) this couldn’t have been possible without Jason’s work upon which I built this so kudos go to him while all the mistakes remain mine

4) I’ve been working on integrating the schema explorer with the upcoming freebase developer’s documentation hub, so that newcomers won’t have to hunt down this URL in the mail archives to find a little guidance in the type maze.

Enjoy!

It’s a mere two weeks til the Freebase Hack Day and Unconference on July 11th in San Francisco. If you haven’t yet signed up, you should!

Plans are coming together. We’re starting to organise some projects to hack on and hunt down people to run sessions in the unconference. If you’ve got a project or a subject area you’d like covered, let us know! So far, some of the exciting topics that will be part of Hack Day include:

• We’ll be launching Acre 1.0 just a few days before Hack Day. Jason Douglas will be showing off the features of our hosted app development platform, including the ability to share and clone apps, connect to other APIs with our keystore and OAuth, and build queries and templated web pages based on Freebase data more easily than ever before. Acre’s come a long way since our last Hack Day, so don’t miss this. (Read more about Acre.)
• The MQL Boot Camp will be run this year by Bryan Culbertson. Learn how to query against Freebase’s structured data about almost 6 million topics, and see the new features of our query editor, including tab-completion for syntax and schema. (Read more about MQL and the query editor).
• Learn how to use Freebase to enhance your website with structured data, like the Wall Street Journal, or build entire apps and websites on Acre, like Tippify.
• Hack on apps like our Games With A Purpose, a TV program schedule mashup, and more. If you have a project and you’re looking for partners, technical help, or ideas, bring it with you! We’re also working on having a handful of projects ready for people to hack on who haven’t brought one of their own.)
• Find out about how Freebase’s part in the Linked Open Data world, and how to use Semantic Web techniques and tools to work with Freebase data.

Same as last time, we’ll have three meeting rooms available for presentations, discussions, and other unconference programming, while our main lunch room area and lounge will be available for general hacking and chat. Come prepared to talk about what interests you, share your ideas, and collaborate!

This event is completely free, but places are limited.

Coffee, lunch, and snacks will be provided, including vegetarian options. Unfortunately we can’t offer childcare or kids’ activities at this time, but parents of babies are welcome to bring them.

Please help us spread the word. Link to this blog post, or to http://freebasehackday.eventbrite.com/, tweet about the event, or just tell your friends and colleagues. It’s going to be a great event!

If you are a movie fan, you might have noticed that The Wall Street Journal recently joined the Freebase developer community, integrating Freebase content into film reviews on WSJ.com.

Most noticeably, each review now features a widget on the right-hand side (called “Films Mentioned In This Article”) that provides the reader with useful information about all of the films that are reviewed on that page. It includes the film name, image, director, and cast, along with links to useful third party sites like Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes, and links to related film reviews on WSJ.com:

All of this is powered by the free data, images, relationships, and third party identifiers stored in Freebase.

At the top of this widget, there is also a search box powered by Freebase Suggest. This allows visitors to WSJ.com to easily search the WSJ film review archives and discover similar films they might not have known about. Because the search box uses Freebase Suggest, it takes advantage of our handy autocomplete feature, shows previews of each entry, and limits the results set specifically to films that appear in the WSJ index. Pretty cool!

Behind the scenes, the app users other publisher-friendly features, like an editorial tool that allows the WSJ team to review all changes made to the data before it goes live on WSJ.com.

We’re excited to see open data from Freebase being integrated into more sites across the Web and to have sites like the Wall Street Journal contributing back to Freebase. If you are interested in having similar content integrated into your site, please let us know! It’s all powered by Acre and Freebase Suggest, so the same tools can be cloned and reused anywhere else on the Web.