For those of you who've filled out your freebase profile, (http://www.freebase.com/view/user) and entered your home town, you've probably noticed that (at least in the US) Freebase has an amazing breadth of location data - thanks in part to Wikipedia and some free data from the US Government...

Well, now's the chance to make sure your home town and grade school is properly represented in Freebase.

When you were growing up, you probably always heard the legend that someone famous was from your town, went to your school, or that some famous thing was invented there.

I'm from Lexington, MA, which is not just a historical town (the American Revolution began just a mile from the house I grew up in) but was also a frequent filming location for "This Old House" - yeah, I know, it's a fascinating place. I'll spare you more AMAZING facts about Lexington and move onto the task at hand.

Go take all the trivia that you know about your town, your school, whatever, and see if you can figure out a way to represent this in Freebase. Here are a few ideas from different Freebase domains:

* famous actors/musicians/scientists/politicians/athletes/etc born your town - visit the topic page for that person, and add it * famous actors/etc that went to your high school/grade school/etc - make sure you school is there and then enter stuff in the "Students/Graduates" section * films or tv shows that were filmed in your town - cotype your town as a "film location" and enter their names * Fictional works that take place in your town - cotype your town as a fictional setting * Fill out your school's data - school news paper, mascot, when it was founded, etc * Companies or websites that are in your town * Notable buildings * Notable schools, colleges, etc * Sports teams from or that play in your town * Famous military conflicts

Anything else? For more inspiration, check out the full list of other types that use "Location" on the location schema page: http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=/location/location

And for the bonus: I'd like to challenge someone to come up with a "Welcome to ...." MQL page which captures all of this information for any given location across all these different domains.

Alec

P.S. I was playing with IMDB searches and discovered this:

http://www.imdb.com/List?locations=Lexington,%20Massachusetts,%20USA

There isn't a real form on imdb.com that allows you to get there but you can figure out how to tweak the above URL.. but I'd be curious if there are other locations on the web to gather trivia about specific locations - post here and share with your fellow freebasers!