Topic
From Freebase
A Topic in Freebase represents a single concept or real-world thing. Each topic has its own web page on freebase.com. A topic could also be called an entity, resource or element or thing, it is a fundamental unit in Freebase. All topics have the type /common/topic in addition to any other types they've been assigned. As of March 2010, there are about 12 million topics in Freebase.
Examples of topics include:
- Barack Obama (person)
- Coit Tower (building)
- Goldfinger (film)
- Neuroscience (medical specialty)
Topics are displayed on the Freebase client's Topic page, and in Freebase Suggest.
Each topic has a Guid or globally unique ID, which looks like /guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000029c277. It may also have other Keys which are easier to read/remember. For instance, the topic with the aforementioned guid also has the key /en/barack_obama.
Contents |
How many topics are there in Freebase?
As of March 2010, about 12 million. You can see the current number at any time by visiting the explore page.
What isn't a topic
Freebase contains many (15M+) graph nodes or objects which are not Topics. Generally it is because they are not entities in their own right, but there are also some historical holdovers from a time when it was necessary to conserve storage space (most notably, music tracks).
Below is a list of some non-Topic object types that Tom Morris posted to the freebase-discuss list in March, 2010:
- CVTs - sometimes called mediators, which connect multiple things together or include some connections and some data.
- Music tracks - 4.1 million (these are planned to become topics eventually)
- Documents - 3.6M - the metadata associated with topic descriptions, etc
- ISBNs & paginations for books - 2.2M each
- Web page links - 1.5M
- Image metadata - 1.3M
- Dated integer/float - 1.0M/0.3M
- Rectangle - 0.3M - dimensions of an image typically
- Mailing address/phone number - 0.3M/.17M
- Wordnet word sense - 0.2M
/common/topic
/common/topic is a type that describes core information about how something is to be used on freebase. its properties include:
Editing topics
You can edit a topic using the Edit mode of the Topic page. See Editing topics for more information.
See also: Creating a new topic
