When I wrote about Metaweb and Freebase on March 21st, I thought that my long-term interest in this technology would be centered on the Metaweb API. In real life, what happened is that I got interested in structuring types in Freebase that would map to other public databases, with the aim of making it easier for people to find what they need in those databases.
The first example that came to my mind was the US Patent database, which is something that people working with intellectual property and technology transfer use extensively. Thomson Delphion has made a commercial business out of adding value to the USPTO databases. A subset of Delphion's functionality can be used with a free subscription, but some of the most useful features require a paid subscription. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/ is another site along the same lines. It struck me that Freebase could be used to implement something similar.
With an eye on the structure of the USPTO databases, I created a set of related types in Freebase that could hold just enough information about a patent to be searchable; my thought was that once a user found something interesting, he could follow a link into the full patent text and figures on the USPTO site. In the figure above, the bold black text represents property names, and the blue text gives the type of a property. For example, I created an Inventor type that is a kind of Person, and a Patent Assignee type that is a kind of Company, University, or Institution. The Suggested Properties at the bottom of the design are automatic back links from other types: for example, Patents have Inventors, and Inventors have Patents.
All of this took a few hours of online time, after several days of mulling it over. To test my design, I have manually copied and pasted an example from the USPTO database, and it seems to make sense. Now, for this to be useful, Freebase would have to create a public set of types around patents (based on my design, or on a design of their own) and then undertake to bulk load the patent database and schedule periodic updates.
Freebase is still in the Alpha phase, however, and I suspect that they'll go after lower-hanging fruit first. Still, the possibility is there, and I'll be interested to see how it plays out.
I do have a few unused Freebase invitations, which are earmarked for "data fanatics." If that describes you, please drop me a note, either as a comment to this post or as an email to martin_heller@infoworld.com.
Posted by Martin Heller on May 16, 2007 06:46 AM
