How do I use the influence node on Freebase?

Question

I am looking to search for influential people from Freebase database. I have tried to look at this but I can't get my head around developing the query to get a bug-free result. Here's the link: www.freebase.com/influence/influence_node.

Answer 1

To get started, you can get the count of all influence nodes on Freebase via this query:

{
  "type": "/influence/influence_node",
  "return": "count"
}

(which returns 50856 for me just now)

To get the graph structure, you will need to first query the influence nodes and their neighbors like this:

[{
  "mid": null,
  "name": null,
  "type": "/influence/influence_node",
  "influenced": [{
    "mid": null,
    "name": null,
    "optional": true
  }],
  "influenced_by": [{
    "mid": null,
    "name": null,
    "optional": true
  }]
}]

then transform the resulting list of nodes into edges by using the mid field (machine id, one of several unique ids on Freebase). Note while Freebase returns only the first 100 nodes, you can page through the result by using the cursor parameter in the mqlread API. Note also that "option": true keep nodes with no influencers or influencees around in the result.

Answer 2

A good start would be to click on the "Instances" tab at the URL you gave, then click on "Build Query" from the gear dropdown at the far right of the resulting page.

That will give you access to the network of influencers and influences, but you'll need to figure out how to weight the raw results because not all influencers are created equal. Some are master's thesis advisor's, others "influenced," in some undefined way, an artist's style, and I'm sure you can imagine many more variants -- each having more or less weight depending on the values which are important to your particular study.

Another factor you may want to include (or not) is what Google things about the ranking of specific entities in terms of importance or relevance. The Freebase search, with the appropriate option settings, would be one way to incorporate this, albeit in a black box sort of way without any access to why they thing something is more or less important.