Mappings to Freebase

[jnothman]

We should be able to build mappings to Freebase IDs. The original data includes this information, which is more robust to e.g. a title becoming a disambiguation page.

[hoffart]

Is there any description of how Freebase solves the problem of page moves and keeps its IDs consistent?

[jnothman]

I haven't seen one. But I believe Wikipedia ids (not titles) move with page moves, and certainly sufficient information is available by processing the revision history (which Freebase has the resources to do). And Freebase does indicate timestamps when relating one of their entities to a Wikipedia entry.

FB may or may not effectively handle trickier cases such as a person's page being dissolved into their organisation or product page, after editors decide the person is not especially notable. Since this looks identical to a merging of entities, will Freebase merge their ids, or maintain an old ID that no longer has a Wikipedia correspondence?

In any case, I've not seen it documented.