David Huynh completed his PhD at MIT CSAIL last year and joined MetaWeb a few months ago, where he has been working on new and better interfaces to explore the data encoded in their Freebase system. He recently released Parallax as a prototype browsing interface for Freebase. Here is a video that shows the interface in action.

Freebase is “an open database of the world’s information” that is constructed by a Wiki-like collaborative community. In many ways it is like the Semantic Web model, with two big differences: (1) the data is stored centrally rather than distributed across the Web and (2) the representation system is not based on RDF but rather uses a custom built object-oriented data representation language.

Freebase is a great resource. Much of the data is extracted from Wikipedia, so its content has a large overlap with DBpedia. But it is also relatively easy to upload additional information in various structured forms and many have done so, resulting in an extended coverage.

This is clearly a system in the Web of Data space along with the Linking Open Data effort and having it should offer a way for us all to explore the consequences of some of the underlying design decisions.