apirdffreebase

Alternatives to freebase usercontent API which have been shut down


I use Freebase data dump as core dataset for my travel application. Cities may have one or more associated images identified by MIDs(the freebase identifier for all things) . I was able to use the following API call as suggested in Stackoverflow here , to show up the images in my applications which was working fine till yesterday

https://usercontent.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/image/m/044k8_h?maxwidth=500&maxheight=500&mode=fillcropmid

However I knew that Freebase is being shut down and being migrated to Wikidata. However there is no documentation wrt migration of images from freebase, which were available through Freebase usercontent API, to Wikidata.

Therefore I was unable to migrate from the deprecated Freebase UserContent API as above till date. However the above API (and all Freebase APIs including the Freebase website) stopped working today and I am left high and dry(have some investor demos scheduled this week) as Travel Application is pretty much useless without images.

Any ideas if the images user content referred to in freebase has been migrated to Wikidata and any pointers to documentation would be very very useful!!

Any help would be useful


Solution

  • Images have not been migrated. As a matter of fact, almost no Freebase data has been migrated to Wikidata, but that's a different story.

    Some Wikidata items do have Freebase IDs and some also have links to images in Wikimedia Commons, so the intersection of these two sets may give you a relatively straightforward path forward.

    In the mean time, be sure to preserve your cache of images so you can at least limp along (you were caching, right?).