Google Freebase Search API Alternative?

2018-06-22 23:24:22

Google deprecated their Freebase Search API, and is transferring things over to Wikidata, however there appears to be no replacement for their Freebase Search API (https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/search-overview) that:

Autosuggesting entities (eg Freebase Suggest Widget)

Getting a ranked list of the most notable entities with a given name.

Finding entities using Search Metaschema.

Moreover, it would also take in malformed strings and correct them, and return nice detailed relevancy rankings, along with the associated freebase topic id. I can't find anything in their Custom Search API that returns any information relevant to their, or any other knowledge graph.

Ideally would like something that I can query similar to this and returns a result like they used to:

For example, a query of "Nirvana" in the Freebase Search API would return:

{
  "status":"200 OK",
  "result":[
    {
      "mid":"/m/0b1zz",
      "name":"Nirvana",
      "notable":{"name":"Record Producer","id":"/music/producer"},
      "score":55.227268
    },{
      "mid":"/m/05b3c",
      "name":"Nirvana",
      "notable":{"name":"Belief","id":"/religion/belief"},
      "score":44.248726
    },{
      "mid":"/m/01h89tx",
      "name":"Nirvana",
      "notable":{"name":"Musical Album","id":"/music/album"},
      "score":30.371510
    },{
      "mid":"/m/01rn9fm",
      "name":"Nirvana",
      "notable":{"name":"Musical Group","id":"/music/musical_group"},
      "score":30.092449
    },{
      "mid":"/m/02_6qh",
      "name":"Nirvana",
      "notable":{"name":"Film","id":"/film/film"},
      "score":29.003593
    },{
      "mid":"/m/01rkx5",
      "name":"Nirvana Sutra",
      "score":21.344824
    }
  ],
  "cost":10,
  "hits":0
}

Note the relevance, and Freebase mid.

Essentially are there any alternatives out there, either open source, or commercial that replaces this much needed functionality?

I've used the Prismatic Interest graph API for somewhat similar functionality. My use-case was a bit different (tagging documents with topics) but looking at their API endpoints you might be able to duplicate the functionality you described above with a query to topic/search (search for topics that match a search string) and a query to topic/topic to search for similar topics (sorted by score).

Edit

As David notes in the comments below, the Prismatic Interest Graph API has been discontinued.

Also, the Google Knowledge Graph Search API now seems to be the intended replacement for the Freebase Search API.

The :BaseKB project offers Freebase data (plus some other data) as RDF. :BaseKB's data can be downloaded for free or easily run on an AWS instance for live queries. The AWS machine image contains a Virtuoso database so you can query it with the SPARQL query language.