The Freebase site has opened up to public access (read only) and I suggest you check it out. I have mentioned Freebase on Loomware before, especially in the context of its Semantic Web/Wikipedia aspects. From the e-mail:
Freebase.com is now in "public alpha". Anybody in the world can search and browse the site. All applications based on the Freebase API have public read access.
Also, thanks to great feedback from an active alpha community, the Freebase site has improved quite a bit, and there is a growing group of enthusiastic contributors and developers. There is a lot of new data -- over 30,000 films, 500,000 notable people, more sports, businesses, science and so on.