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
Metaweb holds the promise of all connected humankind weaving a tapestry of connections that more and more of us will be able to stand back and say, "Hmmm....I see a pattern here" and thus be able to invent ever higher value, solve deeper and more profound
As statistics-based search engines become increasingly powerful, is there still a role for common sense knowledge and reasoning? Participate in a global effort to develop the world's most comprehensive knowledge base! Play FACTory, and help improve Cyc's
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?
If you search Google Base, you will find many records describing this camera, all loaded by different people. Data in one record may duplicate the data in another record. Or even worse, data in one may disagree with the others and no attempt has been mad
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
One of the key issues of the future will concern whether communications and culture are increasingly commodified or are decommodified. Who will control the media and technologies of the future, and debates over the public's access to media, media accounta
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
“We’re trying to create the world’s database, with all of the world’s information,” says Hillis. How will this agenda alleviate growing risks of fashioning a global information monopoly?
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