Using freebase
Over a year ago I blogged about freebase - a user driven database with structured data in it. Sort of like wikipedia but with "real" data in it. Since then freebase has opened up to all users and added even more content. Much of the content are imported from other sources so that the user base doesn't have to start from scratch. I played around for a while adding entries about this blog, myself and some more stuff that I was thinking about at the time. Cool but maybe not that useful yet. Now they have announced acre which is a nice and handy way to build web sites on top of freebase. Consider the imdb-like FMDB that uses the comprehensive movie archive of freebase. Nice! Acre is deployed in an hosted environment so developers will be tied deploymentwise to freebase. Lets hope that the same concept might be used on external web sites. The technology used is special tags and attributes that acre hook into to provide data from freebase.