Freebase is a web application that organisations and individuals use to easily publish information on-line, in a semantic structure, collaboratively. Contributors from around the world can use the application to structure and edit any topic in the system or define meaningful links and relationships between topics. All of the information in Freebase is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means it can be reused for any purpose without going through a copyright clearance process. To encourage the reuse of information, Freebase has made some programming tools available to ease the creation of web applications that extract live data from the system.
Freebase is important for educators, not just as another option to be considered when publishing, consuming or signposting information, but also because it exemplifies some significant trends.
One trend is the semantic storage and presentation of information. This allows topics and concepts to be meaningfully linked and queried at a more refined level than traditional web sites. For example, the Britannica article on Shakespeare links to Stratford-upon-Avon but the link only has meaning because of its context in the surrounding text. The Freebase topic on Shakespeare defines the link relationship as “place of birth”.
Defining relationships between topics makes it possible for applications to do more with data. An engaging example is the CineSpin application that works with the relationships between people and the films they've been involved with.
A more developed example of the use of the semantic encoding of knowledge in an academic environment is the Foundational Model Explorer produced by the Structural Informatics Group at the University of Washington. This presents a web interface for navigating the Digital Anatomist Foundation Model of Anatomy. Although it doesn't use Freebase, the application does illustrate the depths of relations that can be explored within semantic frameworks.
Creating and editing information in Freebase is achieved using a clear, simple web interface. As this is a semantic database, the structure in which the information is stored is as important as the information itself. Consequently Freebase provides a simple interface through which users can define new types of information and suggest modifications to existing types.
Another trend that Freebase illustrates is the collaborative authoring and maintenance of data repositories. Any Freebase user can edit any topic, which means that the system is open to vandalism and that any point in time there is no guarantee of the accuracy of any individual piece of data. Like Wikipedia, there are versioning and moderation structures in place. It's only through continued use that the effectiveness of those checks and balances can be evaluated.
A final trend is the free provision of a web service. In this Freebase joins the ranks of Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Base, SlideShare, Internet Archive, Yahoo Pipes, Google Mashups, Grabbr and host of others to provide, free of charge, applications, infrastructure and support that in the past would have been costly components and significant project phases for many e-learning initiatives.
Some issues that arise for educators are:
- what effect the existence of an open semantic model of a knowledge domain will have on students and educators working within that domain;
- what opportunities for automated formative assessment will arise and what implications will these have on the quality of assessment and feedback;
- how will the quality of the user interfaces of external applications affect student satisfaction with internal applications and learning environments;
- what personal, departmental and institutional involvement is appropriate in shaping, populating and maintaining external knowledge repositories;
- what steps should institutions take to protect or release their intellectual property rights;
- what are the benefits and risks of using external applications to support internal service delivery.
An alternative, for those who wish to explore collaborative semantic development while retaining tighter control of security and intellectual property, is the Protégé ontology editor developed by Stanford Medical Informatics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Protégé can be used as a stand alone package, as workgroup software or as a web application. It is an extremely powerful and flexible tool that supports a wider range of Semantic Web standards. Consequently it can be more complex to use, manage and deploy.
Those wishing to make their data sets public without allowing others to edit their data should consider Google Base as an alternative. This gives free storage and bandwidth, but without the collaborative or semantic relationship features.
At the time of writing Freebase is in its alpha stage of development. The data structures and content are under active development, as is the application itself. Now is an ideal time to participate in the creation of content and structure.
Phil Rees is a freelance learning technologist and web developer based in Burnaby, British Columbia. Phil has over two decades experience as a trainer and developer in workplace training, further education and higher education institutions. In the past decade the majority of his time has been spent at the University of Oxford, developing and implementing learning technologies and web applications for Templeton College and the Medical Sciences Division.
Thanks Phil. A useful discussion, especially your points on the issues for educators. One application that I have found compelling in semantic web projects is the Semantic MediaWiki (a set of semantic extentions to the open source software that powers Wikipedia and many other wikis). By (i) making it easy for anyone to add semantics and (ii) adding the semantics in the context of the content it provides and intuitive 'easy entry point'. The RDF generated can be exported to Protege for further development.
Posted by: Steven Forth | 08/10/2007 at 12:56