[lawlesst]

Is there evidence that the migration to Wikidata is half-hearted? This was just announced in December.

Not sure this is evidence of a "sad demise". Wikidata is non-commercial project managed by a foundation. Freebase/Metaweb was always a commercial project. Seems like this is a move towards openness if anything.

Full Freebase data dumps have long been available.

https://developers.google.com/freebase/data

[frik]

Freebase updated the data dumps monthly. The main data source is Wikipedia, with many other data sources that update their content frequently.

Without releasing the tools and without a community who adds/fixes the data, it will be a lot less useful/useless. It's like reading a years old printed lexicon.

There is a lot evidence that the up-coming event will be a big loss - do a web search. A lot of software has been written and a lot of effort at e.g. http://schema.org has been made, all based on Freebase ontology with links to Freebase website. Freebase is basically the machine readable form of Wikipedia plus a lot of other data sources.

It's basically like closing down Wikipedia. And then a data dump of Wikipedia of March 2015 will be useless in 2020!

Do Facebook, Microsoft, Nuance, IBM, WolframResearch all have already an in-house Freebase clone. Or how do they update their databases in near future - the data used for Siri, Cortana, Siri, Watson, WolframAlpha. If not, would one of these companies be so kind and boot-strap/support an open Freebase rescue project?

[lawlesst]

Freebase doesn't have an ontology in the Semantic Web sense. It's always been a specialized tool with non standard protocols like MQL. Schema.org is somewhat related but not tied whatsoever to Freebase.

Wikidata is fully editable and has an ecosystem for updating data so concerns about stale data aren't valid. Since Wikipedia will be pulling from it (is already in some cases) you could argue that their will be more sunlight on the data.

There's been a lot of code written against Freebase APIs (me included) but it isn't sad it's going away. It's the risk you take when relying on 3rd party services. I think your confusing short term developer convenience with a real loss of open data.