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Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

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Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#21

Post by rmc »

izendejas wrote: post #5

This is huge for many reasons, but namely, this could finally lead to the "semantic web." Metaweb's video, which is linked to in the article, explains part of the "how". The problem with the semantic web is that many need to embrace it. Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities). That can take a big effort and there has to be a ROI for this big undertaking. The other is that th…

The problem with the semantic web is you need a universal ontology. i.e. you need everyone to agree on the same thing. Cory Doctorow's Metacrap explains more http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#22

Post by LiveTheDream »

cybernytrix wrote: post #17

Are there anyone here that downloaded and played with their data set (PG dump). I have fiddled with one of their table to process their Wikipedia data. I think Google bought it for their supposedly wicked-fast GraphDB.

Freebase's blog post on graphd (their speedy, non-open-source tuple store):

http://blog.freebase.com/2008/04/09/a-brief-tour-of-graphd/

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#24

Post by csl »

izendejas wrote: post #10
csytan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing is that several different unique ids can be interlinked to the same entity. I was using Wikipedia page_ids and IMDB's titles when playing around with it previously. It's a little bit messy, but it works.

Exactly! And freebase has a lot of this data mapped. This data is so rich it holds huge potential. For example (for those that are unfamiliar with the richness of this data), visit: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/y_combinator And there you'll note that Y Combinator is mapped to the official site, it's Wikipedia page, it can tell you who the founders are, etc. If you link to Paul Grahm, you can then find out what his…

It's even more -- you can do really cool queries with the data. E.g., ask for all people linked less than three degrees of separation from PG and whose ages are between 20 and 40 (as a rather lame example).

I do hope Google will do something cool with this acquisition.

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#25

Post by rootis0 »

When I saw Metaweb in the headline what immediately sprang to mind was the excellent wikipedia they maintained for Neal Stephensons's "The Baroque Cycle". It was called Quicksilver wiki.

I myself learned about it from Stephenson himself during a presentation he did for the book in the now defunct Cody's Books in Berkeley. After 2-3 years of active growth the Quicksilver wiki disappeared from metaweb's site. I was wondering if Google will restore the wiki too?

Metaweb briefly mentioned at the end of this article in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#26

Post by fauigerzigerk »

This seems very significant to me. So far, there has always been this opposition between algorithmic extraction of meaning and modeled structed data. It never made sense to me, because using both leads to so much better query results. I've been doing it for years and I was starting to wonder why the idea isn't catching on. It's been a really tough sell. I hope this is going to be a real breakthrough. Managing spam will be difficult though.

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#27

Post by _pius »

rmc wrote: post #21
izendejas wrote: post #5

This is huge for many reasons, but namely, this could finally lead to the "semantic web." Metaweb's video, which is linked to in the article, explains part of the "how". The problem with the semantic web is that many need to embrace it. Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities). That can take a big effort and there has to be a ROI for this big undertaking. The other is that th…

The problem with the semantic web is you need a universal ontology. i.e. you need everyone to agree on the same thing. Cory Doctorow's Metacrap explains more http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

That's a strawman. You in fact don't need a "universal ontology," you just need people to agree on first principles (e.g. URLs are unique, there are things called triples, etc.)

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#29

Post by samratjp »

This is great news - Metaweb always had pretty good APIs that made a friendly kid in the block. I can see this being immediately useful everywhere for google's offerings. Man, YouTube would be friggin awesome metadata for say music videos or a few hundred more layers for google earth. Sweet!

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#30

Post by neilk »

rmc wrote: post #21
izendejas wrote: post #5

This is huge for many reasons, but namely, this could finally lead to the "semantic web." Metaweb's video, which is linked to in the article, explains part of the "how". The problem with the semantic web is that many need to embrace it. Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities). That can take a big effort and there has to be a ROI for this big undertaking. The other is that th…

The problem with the semantic web is you need a universal ontology. i.e. you need everyone to agree on the same thing. Cory Doctorow's Metacrap explains more http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

That's a reason why the Semantic Web won't wake up and become conscious, like many bad sci-fi stories.

However, if you think of it "vocabularies for people to tag their own stuff in a structured way", which Google can then index and traverse, then it's more realistic.

That said, the Semantic Web people are indeed guilty of hyping this technology as being able to "reason" on its own.

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