[game_preservation] The FreeBase database project

Andrew Armstrong andrew at aarmstrong.org
Wed Sep 5 19:30:26 EDT 2007


I offered to put up a bit of info for those possibly interested here,
about Freebase <http://www.freebase.com/>, some online database I'd
personally never heard of, however it has a videogames section
<http://www.freebase.com/view/domain/cvg>, mostly at the moment pulled
from sources such as wikipedia, and currently expanding. Note its
Javascript heavy (I guess, "Web 2.0" too).

Seems like a good project for bringing up lots of related data and
categorising it all, hopefully will be useful for historians if it gets
better - also some fun might be made of it sooner or later (its
currently in alpha) since applications can be built on top of the data
(licensed by Creative Commons, something that bugged me about MobyGames)
- see the tutorial <http://www.freebase.com/view/tutorial/index.html>,
and a demo of an app <http://kidbombay.com/clients/freebase/filmSpin/>
on the film side, which I suspect could easily be altered to do the same
for games. The site isn't too easy to navigate at the moment, I've been
told its still being worked on a lot (thus the alpha status).

Hopefully will become a decent filled out database in time (there are
lots and lots of entries, but not all the data is there yet). Since I'm
not exactly a knowledgeable database guy or archivist, so not sure how
useful the current data or fields are, but it looks like some pretty
good things can be done with the filled out data, and good structured
projects like this can help searching for that bit of information that's
needed, even if MobyGames is currently a key database. Oddly enough,
MobyGames misses games this project has - such as the original Pong, due
to its structure (ie; not having arcade games), so I am sure both can be
useful at the same time.

Andrew
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