So it looks like Google just updated their Knowledge Graph, and I am officially an entity!

The information comes from Freebase, an open source database of entities and things that was acquired by Google in 2010. Freebase is one of the databases that Google pulls data from for its Knowledge Graph (along with Wikipedia and the CIA Factbook) and is by far the easiest source to contribute to, since anyone can sign up to be a contributor.

I joined Freebase towards the end of October (after reading this great article by Andrew Isidoro), so it’s been roughly 2 months since I added my entry to Freebase and I was incorporated into the Knowledge Graph. Some of the other entities I created are not yet recognized by Google, so maybe Google incorporates entities incrementally, or possibly I need to more deeply interlink the other entities before they are recognized.

In any case, I’m now an entity and I’ll continue to contribute to Freebase in the hopes of getting more entities picked up by the Knowledge Graph. It’s actually pretty fun typing in queries about myself to see what turns up a KG card, similar to playing around with Siri to see what it responds to.

Here are some other queries that work: how tall is takeshi young, where was takeshi young born, where did takeshi young go to school, what languages does takeshi young speak.