Wikidata has a different license, it's just a PR piece that means little. How many facts have been imported since Jan 2015? Wikidata is at 15,473,837, Freebase (summer 2015) is at 3,146,939,673. Basically Google's Freebase shut-down throw AI research back at least two years (assuming Wikidata can catch up to 90% of Freebase size in 2018). Now Google, Microsoft and IBM have an competitive advantage - each has its own closed knowledge base.
A stale 6 months old Freebase dump gets more useless over time. Wikidata has a different license, it's just a PR piece that means little. 15,473,837 (Wikidata) vs 3,146,939,673 (Freebase) - little has changed since Jan 2015.
> would it be correct to say the issue is Google isn't releasing their new data for free?
How about: Google shut-down a knowledge-base that was curated by a community, that provided regular data dumps, an online interface and an API - all with an open license (the original data source is nevertheless Wikipedia et al). Google's new venture is basically the same core technology and data but the crawler run also over the scrapped web content. And the only access for non-Googlers is via an API. Make your own conclusion from that.
That 3,146,939,673 number is the number of statements (triples), not the number of resources (which is the Wikidata number). Wikidata has 900M statements, not 15M[1].
Again, the Google Knowledge Base is much more than an expanded Freebase. It uses Google's Knowledge Vault project to extract from sources outside Freebase, as well as to evaluate and update the Freebase resources. To quote:
In particular, KV has 1.6B triples, of which
324M have a confident of 0.7 or higher, and 271M have a
confidence of 0.9 or higher. This is about 38 times more than
the largest previous comparable system (DeepDive [32]),
which has 7M confident facts (Ce Zhang, personal communication). To create a knowledge base of such size, we extract
facts from a large variety of sources of Web data, including
free text, HTML DOM trees, HTML Web tables, and human annotations of Web pages. (Note that about 1/3 of the 271M confident triples were not previously in Freebase, so we are extracting new knowledge not contained in the prior.)[2]
