Digging into Freebase and Guesses about their GeoWeb functionality

After coming across Freebase’s blog post about using their data for map generation I thought it would be fun to dig in a little deeper. According to the post Jamie Taylor of Freebase teamed up with Jonathan Lowe of GisWebsite. A very clever pairing and I’m interested to see the final results.

In the mean time a bit of hypothesizing. From the photo -

It looks like they are using Jonathan’s Giswebsite platform which looks to be a combination of UMN’s Mapserver and probably PostGIS. From the post all the data on the map comes from Freebase, so we can infer that Freebase is support polygons, points, and most likely polylines. This alone is great to see because it means that Freebase geo-support is for more than just lat/long features. A little digging on Freebase itself confirms this. On Jonathan’s data “types” page there are schemas for:

# FeatureCollection,
# Feature,
# GeometryCollection,
# Box,
# MultiPolygon,
# MultiLineString,
# MultiPoint,
# Polygon,
# LineString

Of these only “polygon” and “linestring” had descriptions and examples. For instance when you click on polygon you get a set of results for mostly commons and ponds in the UK, which look much like this result for “Eagle Pond“. Lots of possibilities in this framework, and we are beginning to see some simple and effective ones implemented already – like this mashup up buildings by famous architects pulled from Freebase. Look forward to learning more when it is presented at Where 2.0.