I just came across the following page on Freebase: http://vancouver.freebase.com/. This page is what Freebase calls a Base, which is a collection of Tables/Views, which are things like “Vancouver Bloggers“, “Mayoral Candidates 2008” and so forth. A Table/View is a list of Topics, which are basically the equivalent of a Wikipedia page. Get all that? It makes sense after a while

A few observations:

• Why have I written Table/View above? Because in some places it’s called a Table and other places it’s called a View. Which is it? I’m guessing View but it’s still not 100% clear.
• I decided to create our own Toronto Base especially for the TorCamp community. Given that you get your own top-level domain name there’s somewhat of an incentive to be a first-mover on this
• When you create a Base, it provides a list of suggested Views that can be added. Nice. Unfortunately, it added each View twice. I then had to go delete the duplicate View manually. Not so nice. And then even though I’ve deleted the View it still shows up on a detail page. Sigh.
• On thus plus side, this is all done in a nice-Ajaxy way
• It’s really not at all obvious how you create a new View. Really not obvious. Here’s the documentation.
• My initial opinion was that Views seem to be copies, not references: this turns out to be a wrong assumption on my part. Views are in fact (if I got this right) the results of a query on the Freebase db. This means that as more Topics match the View query, they’ll automatically show up. The query is a copy, not a reference, but this is a good thing.
• The implication is that it’s difficult to create a View that is an arbitrary “bag” of topics. For example, if I want to create a Toronto Bloggers View, I have to actually make sure that all the Topics that will show up are marked with some attribute that can be matched to give them a Toronto-bloggerness quality.