History of Freebase
From Freebase
Contents |
2000
Danny Hillis first described his idea for creating a "knowledge web", which he called Aristotle, in a paper in 2000.
Danny's company, Applied Minds, was founded this year.
2003
The project known as "The Metaweb" begins, inside Applied Minds.
Robert Cook, drawing on a background in parallel computing and database design, became Metaweb’s executive vice president of product development.
2005
A number of people are now working on Metaweb full time, from a San Francisco office.
John Giannandrea, formerly chief technologist at Tellme Networks and Netscape/AOL's browser group, is hired as Metaweb’s CTO.[1]
2006
October 2006 OTG, the One True Graph, is born.
December 11 2006 There are 1.9M topics in the graph.
2007
February 2007 Metaweb now owns the "Freebase" brand and domain.
February 22, 2007 first post on the Freebase blog.
On March 3, 2007, Metaweb publicly announced Freebase, described by the company as "an open shared database of the world's knowledge," and "a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data." Initial alpha requires signup/authentication to view the site or use any API functions, and accounts are only available by invitation (which you could sign up for on the front page).
July 27, 2007 Thomas Layton joins Metaweb as CEO.
August 2007 Alpha access is widened: All right Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up. Freebase.com is now browsable by anyone, and mqlread access is open without authentication.
August 2007 The Relevance engine is first released to production.
September 2007 First user group meeting in San Francisco
December 2007 Freebase Suggest released.
2008
February 2008 WEX, the Wikipedia Extract, is first made available for download.
August 2008 Freebase Parallax, a demonstration of faceted browsing using Freebase data, released under an Open source license.
August 2008 First London Freebase Meetup held.
On October 29, 2008, at ISWC 2008, Freebase released its RDF service for generating RDF representations of Freebase topics, allowing Freebase to be used as Linked Data.[2]
October 31st, 2008 Major rebranding, including the now-well-known Freebase "F" flag logo. Announcement.
November 2008 First Freebase Hack day held in San Francisco. Announcement, photos
2009
Initial release of the first RABJ apps (Typewriter, Genderizer, and Geographer), built on a precursor of RABJ called RinRABJ (RinRABJ Is Not RABJ).
Freebase hit five million topics on April 8th, 2009. [3].
July 2009 Wall Street Journal starts using Freebase data on its film review pages.
July 11 2009 Second Hack day held in San Francisco. Acre 1.0 is launched in conjunction with the Hack Day.
August 12 2009 8.4 million topics [4]
September 17 2009 This wiki is announced, and documentation becomes community-driven.
November 23rd, 2009 There are >10M topics in the graph.
December 5 2009 Open Library load is completed, bringing millions of book topics.
December 12 2009 Full day Freebase Workshop held in New York City.
2010
Gridworks released under Open source license.
July 16, 2010 Metaweb acquired by Google. Announcement
November 28th, 2010 There are >20M topics in the graph.
