Freebase is a practical, scalable, graph-shaped database of structured general human knowledge, inspired by Semantic Web research and collaborative data communities such as the Wikipedia. Freebase allows public read and write access through an HTTP-based graph-query API for research, the creation and maintenance of structured data, and application building. Access is free and all data in Freebase has a very open (e.g. Creative Commons, GFDL) license.
Kurt D. Bollacker, Robert P. Cook, Patrick Tufts