Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Last week saw the debut of Freebase's Acre integrated application development and hosting environment. But it's something more, too. Consider it the next step in developer Metaweb's mission to build up its data and community (see Freebase Reaches Out.). It's an investment that the company hopes will play a key role in building a community of applications off Freebase data and generating data contributions from their own daily information flows.

"We had developers who were coming and using Freebase as a platform previously, but what we observed were a number of different barriers [some] people were hitting," says Mike Osborn, Metaweb VP of marketing. Often, they didn't know where to start. They saw an incredibly data-rich environment. and had a vision for using that data to power some interesting applications, but to get up the Freebase learning curve is, he acknowledges, "non-trivial."

Acre is one answer to Metaweb's plans to bolster its efforts to have people read and write interesting data from Freebase. Among its features is the fact that all code is viewable, and it's easy to clone or import code from other developers' applications, as a way to help people collaborate. "The fact that we are hosting it and it's a server side Java script-- we believe these are fundamentally important to make it as easy as possible for people to start," says Osborn.

Osborn points as an early example of Freebase's collaborative zeitgeist a member's creation of a Vancouver database, joined by a number of his friends, and the subsequent creation of a set of tools using Google Friend Connect to create a Vancouver Freebase social network to manage projects on the database. "As they load information relating to schools or podcasts [or other things] in Vancouver they have a social network that ties into Freebase and lets them mange their data projects," he says, and related to that they're using Google's custom search application as a mashup to get remarkably clean search results focused on Vancouver.

The concept of writing data to Freebase through the medium of social networks also can be leveraged by larger partners.

"One of the most important constituencies in the Freebase ecosystem are the consumers who simply want to consume or contribute data in onesies and twosies, and we believed all along that the power of Freebase is going to be best enabled when it's in context," Osborn says. Say, for instance, a consumer wants to know all the names of all left-handed quarterbacks in NFL history -- a consumer may discover that information harnessed from Freebase on a social network they frequent, and maybe they even will want to update it with a forgotten quarterback or two. "So there's interest in small and large partners in having a tightly reconciled data application piece from Freebase exposed in their particular product flow, and those types of applications will be very compelling for the developers building them and those contributing back to Freebase through their own normal flows and ordinary consumption."

Over the next year, as Metaweb sees people innovating and creating interesting applications, it plans to foster a more actively managed community that helps people connect and realize there is common work occurring.

"We need to make that a more explicit outbound approach, so people can learn from each other and shorten development cycles," he says. And it will be looking overall at hardening the infrastructure as well. Freebase doesn't have the usage to tax it in any meaningful way yet, Osborn says, but that's something it expects will change as Acre makes its way into users' consciousness.