Last week Metaweb announced that its open information database, Freebase, had gone into public alpha, meaning you no longer need a registered account to access Freebase. Half the reason I know about this is because I wrote some documentation (it's an O'Reilly Short Cut PDF, but you can download it for free) for Freebase developers a few weeks ago. It's really quite an interesting service -- kind of like Wikipedia, only in the form of a graph database.

Frankly, I don't understand the concept of "public alpha" -- I think the term "alpha" in software development belongs more to marketing and PR than it does to programming. If something is still in the alpha stage, it's under active, volatile development, so it's not ready to be used on a critical basis. In this case, the term does not properly apply to Freebase in its current state -- it's perfectly usable and you can start accessing, modifying, and building applications for it right now.

Freebase is an online, publicly accessible graph database (as opposed to a table-based relational database). Much of its data is Creative Commons content from other online information sources like MusicBrainz and Wikipedia, but Freebase's users are slowly refining what's there and adding more information as time goes on and the registered userbase expands. As of this writing, you still need to be registered with Freebase in order to modify or contribute. Registration is handled on an invitation-only basis; if you'd like a Freebase invite, email me at jem at thejemreport.com and I'll send one out to you if I have any left.

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.