That's not what happened at all.
The knowledge graph is much, much more than Freebase. The Freebase data is still available to download, and they are moving it to Wikidata.
The knowledge graph is much, much more than Freebase. The Freebase data is still available to download, and they are moving it to Wikidata.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlao/publication/2014.kdd.pdf (page 3, comparison table) KnowledgeGraph is from the same group as Freebase, just more data and closed.
A stale 6 months old Freebase dump gets more useless over time. Wikidata has a different license, it's just a PR piece that means little. 15,473,837 (Wikidata) vs 3,146,939,673 (Freebase) - little has changed since Jan 2015.
What's the issue with Wikidata's license? Both Freebase and Wikidata seem to be Creative Commons licensed. Is there a catch?
As for progress, if there's anything slowing the migration of Freebase data into Wikidata, I would guess it's Wikidata's different citation standards.
Given that the original Freebase data is still available, would it be correct to say the issue is Google isn't releasing their new data for free?
How about: Google shut-down a knowledge-base that was curated by a community, that provided regular data dumps, an online interface and an API - all with an open license (the original data source is nevertheless Wikipedia et al). Google's new venture is basically the same core technology and data but the crawler run also over the scrapped web content. And the only access for non-Googlers is via an API. Make your own conclusion from that.
Again, the Google Knowledge Base is much more than an expanded Freebase. It uses Google's Knowledge Vault project to extract from sources outside Freebase, as well as to evaluate and update the Freebase resources. To quote:
In particular, KV has 1.6B triples, of which 324M have a confident of 0.7 or higher, and 271M have a confidence of 0.9 or higher. This is about 38 times more than the largest previous comparable system (DeepDive [32]), which has 7M confident facts (Ce Zhang, personal communication). To create a knowledge base of such size, we extract facts from a large variety of sources of Web data, including free text, HTML DOM trees, HTML Web tables, and human annotations of Web pages. (Note that about 1/3 of the 271M confident triples were not previously in Freebase, so we are extracting new knowledge not contained in the prior.)[2]
[1] https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%28COUNT%28*%29%20AS%20...