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  1. PO
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    <p><em>Disclosure: I work on Freebase at Google.</em></p> <p>The music data in Freebase is one of our strongest areas and is going to continue to get broader and richer as we continue to load more datasets. For example, we import data from MusicBrainz, clean it up and match the topics against existing topics in Freebase to avoid duplicates.</p> <ol> <li><p>In terms of downsides, you should be prepared to work with a lot of data. For example, Freebase currently has <a href="http://www.freebase.com/queryeditor?q=%5B%7B%22id%22:null,%22name%22:%22John%20Smith%22,%22type%22:%22/music/group_member%22%7D%5D&amp;autorun=true" rel="nofollow">4 musical artists named "John Smith"</a> which may or may not be useful for your application but you'll still need to figure out which one(s) map to the John Smith that your users are interested in. We call this "reconciliation" and its necessary so that your app knows precisely which topics to query the API for.</p> <p>Since you mentioned music venues I should also point out that while Freebase has a lot of data about places, we don't yet have a geosearch API so you'd need to roll your own if that's something you need.</p> <p>Since anyone can edit Freebase, you should also consider using <a href="http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Data_linkage_guidelines#How_do_I_protect_my_site.2Fapplication_from_malicious_edits_in_Freebase.3F" rel="nofollow">as_of_time</a> to protect your site against vandalism.</p></li> <li><p>Freebase is great for developers because you can easily jump in and clean up bad data or add missing topics. However, one area that has always been a challenge is loading large amounts of data from outside of Google. We've built the <a href="http://openrefine.org/" rel="nofollow">OpenRefine</a> which allows folks to upload datasets, but these datasets must pass a QA process that takes some time to complete. Its necessary to have these QA processes to maintain the level of quality in Freebase, but it does slow down the process of loading large datasets.</p></li> </ol> <p>I really hope that you choose to make use of Freebase music data to build your company. I know that there are already a number of music startups happily using our data.</p>
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    1. POFreebase: Is it worth it to base my company's entire database on it?
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    1. USBen McCann
    1. USShawn Simister
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    1. POFreebase: Is it worth it to base my company's entire database on it?
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    1. COThanks for the explanation, Shawn! Another question is speed - do you find users to typically keep a local copy as well for quick access or do they work directly from Freebase?
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    2. COIt really depend on what sort of application you're building. Our search and topic APIs are very fast and have good caching mechanisms. Mqlread is more varied because it allows arbitrarily complex queries. I think the easiest approach is to just store the Freebase MID in your database (as described on that as_of_time link I gave). That way you don't need to worry about checking Freebase to see if that data has changed. However, if you want to do "six degrees of separation"-type queries to find related music artists; that sort of computation would need to be done offline using our data dumps.
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