How to search in freebase by mid

Question

I have just dumped the data from Freebase, but when I see in the data I see "/m/03lp844" which is mid. But how am I going to get more detail out of that mid? I can't find anything on the documentation.

So, I dumped film data and when I look for actors, it only shows a bunch of mids, but I need actors name as well.

Thanks a lot.

Falito

Answer 1

You should look at the Freebase schema so that you understand how things are connected to each other. In the case of films and actors, they are connected together by an intermediary node /film/performance. You'll need to follow the link from the films to those nodes and from there to the linked actor (and look at the actor's /type/object/name property).

Raouf

Hi Thanks for you answer, but I still don't quite understand. How do I follow the link in the search service. Sorry, it's just that when I look at the search result and I don't know where to go next. – Falito

So "dumped film data" means "used the search service"? Can you provide an example of what you're doing now? – Raouf

Hi, so i go directly to this download.freebase.com/datadumps/latest/browse/film and download film.tsv. If i open that in google refine on column starring, it shows me just mids, which i would like to get more information from mids from that column. – Falito

Did you look at the schema? If you are using that style dump (which is supposed to be going away soon), /film/performance translates to peformance.tsv in the same directory that you found film.tsv for /film/film. If you search for the MID from the Performance column of film.tsv, you'll find a line like: /m/0k6fsl Shelley Duvall The Shining Wendy Torrance with the actor, the film, and the character. – Raouf

Oh, I see it now thanks a lot. One last question, can google refine look up mid from performance.tsv and merge the name into film.tsv? – Falito

Answer 2

The mid is an uniq id for every object in freebase. So you will see a lot of edges pointing to other mids. Indeed, I think only when the linked information is not simple values like string, number, etc, it will be a mid. One easy way to look what those mid refer to is using the rdf api: you could query by key /en/michael_jordan : https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/rdf/en/michael_jordan or you could query by mids: https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/rdf/m/054c1 and you could get the name of actors names using the "rdfs:name" edge. The result RDF api shown to you should be familiar.They are all the triples start with the key or mid in the freebase dump.

other interesting apis are here: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/API you can search, fetch description, find everything related to a mid, etc. Hope it helps.

Bursitis

Answer 3

You can you Freebase's MQLRead api, for example, this would return an json string about all "common topic" about "micheal jordan"

https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query={"id":"/en/michael_jordan","limit":1,"*":null,"type":"/common/topic"}

This would show all the types that /en/micheal_jordan has.

https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query={"id":"/en/michael_jordan","limit":1,"*":null}

Jackie