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
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
“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'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,” says Hillis. How will this agenda alleviate growing risks of fashioning a global information monopoly?
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