There's a bit of buzz today...around Freebase...tools like Freebase and Google Base bring it down to earth for the average user...but the semweb is in need of its own killer app.
With due respect, I think you, and even more aggresiously Clay Shirkey, have been misrepresenting what the Semantic Web is, and critiquing based on that misunderstanding, not on the reality. Folks like Danny Hillis and Nova Spivack who were listening got
The Metaweb technology that supports Freebase is indeed centralized, but only for computational speed. Distributing queries of real-world complexity over a high-latency network is a very difficult problem...[Freebase will] allow wiki-style editing of the
Metaweb is linking to massive content on the web, drawing relationships...[and making it possible for]"you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups, and applications without worrying about restrictive corporate licenses. All
Metaweb Technologies, Inc. is a company based in San Francisco that is developing Metaweb, a semantic data storage infrastructure for the web, and Freebase, an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was founded by Danny Hillis and o
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky? "
What are the rules for contributing data to Freebase? For using data in Freebase? For editing and vetting data "accuracy"? Is Freebase public or proprietary? Centralized or distributed?
What information will be deemed Proprietary? What information is part of the Information Commons? Who decides? How is it decided? Centralized? Decentralized? Opaque? Transparent?
"I am interested in the step beyond that," he says, "where what is going on is not just a passive document, but an active computation, where people are using the Net to think of new things that they couldn't think of as individuals, where the Net thinks o
Emergent structure vs. intelligent design: This all reflects a fundamental if still incoherent debate. There's one school of thought that says that if you just collect enough data and throw enough algorithms at it, the inherent structure - and the underst
I've gotten hammered in the comments on my post about freebase for suggesting that the semantic web was only about controlled ontologies....What's going to be really interesting is to see how the Semantic Web technologies develop now that we have actual,