Freebase user group meeting June 17, 2008

Freebase is a free database of the world's knowledge, licensed under Creative Commons and providing an API to enable mashups, applications, and all kinds of other uses.

The Freebase User Group meets every second month at Freebase HQ (the Metaweb offices) on Howard St, near Montgomery BART.

Come along for an evening of fascinating talks and eye-opening demos from members of the Freebase community and staff.

Speakers include:

Max Lansing from Powerset: Searching Freebase with Natural Language
Max will present a key component of Powerset’s first product, which provides a bridge between the company’s natural language processing technology and Freebase’s structured data, in order to provide Freebase search results for questions or phrase queries.

Kirrily Robert: New features on Freebase.com.
A tour of the best new features of our latest release, including the filter/table view and improvements to domain homepages.

Colin Evans : Hadoop and Jython at Freebase.
How we use Hadoop and parallel processing with Jython to analyse lots of data.

Justin Bonnar: Freebase graph metrics.
What can we learn by looking at Freebase as a general-purpose graph?

Toby Segaran: Visualising free data on public companies.
How Toby used SEC and other data about American corporations to create a Freebase mashup.

Kurt Bollacker: How Freebase mines Wikipedia data
Taking off from Brian’s Wikipedia Mining talk at our last meeting, Kurt will give some more detail about how we extract semantic meaning from Wikipedia articles using various techniques.

We’ll also be having a tshirt giveaway for the highly-sought-after Freebase tshirts.

Please RSVP by Monday 16th June so we know how much food and beer to provide.

Official Website: http://freebase.com/