It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions.

[3][2] Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively.

[5] During its existence, Freebase data was available for commercial and non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and an open API, RDF endpoint, and a database dump is provided for programmers.

[6][2] Both Graphd and MQL, the graph database and JSON-based query language developed by Metaweb for Freebase, are open-sourced by Google under the Apache 2.0 license, and are available on GitHub.

Freebase ran on a database infrastructure created in-house by Metaweb that use a graph model: Instead of using tables and keys to define data structures, Freebase defined its data structure as a set of nodes and a set of links that established relationships between the nodes.

[10] Danny Hillis first described his idea for creating a knowledge web he called Aristotle in a paper in 2000,[11] but he said he did not try to build the system until he had recruited technical experts.

Kurt Bollacker brought deep expertise in distributed systems, database design, and information retrieval to his role as Chief Scientist at Metaweb.

For example, an entry for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, would be entered as a topic that would include a variety of types describing him as an actor, bodybuilder, and politician.