"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
Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons.
Hillis has bigger fish to fry than self-programming gadgets. In the past, he's expressed a desire to create machines that transcend what he sees as the limitations of human beings. "I guess I'm not overly perturbed by the prospect that there might be some
Freebase, having suctioned up some freely available web databases (e.g., Wikipedia, Musicbrainz), structures the data by assigning "types" to entities, which automatically associates additional data that Freebase has defined as related to these "types." T
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,
“We’re trying to create the world’s database, with all of the world’s information,” Mr. Hillis said. All of the information in Freebase will be available under a license that makes it freely shareable, Mr. Hillis said. In the future, he said, t
I do have to take issue with the good Mr. O'Reilly on one point - his contrast between a bottom-up approach in freebase and the opposite in the W3C's approach is almost diametrically out, he's seriously mislocating his elbow here. The Semantic Web languag
Why people would help either company build such a valuable database is unclear. At least with Freebase, people can take data out of it as well, so it has the potential to become a common asset the whole Web could benefit from. Once the database is fille