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…
Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities). This sort of thinking seems to be common in people who like the idea of the semantic Web but who are pessimistic about its implementation. I'm not sure it's going to be the case. As we've seen happen with other technologies, I suspect we'll see a MetaWeb style approach of "deriving the barcodes" from existing and unformatted content.…
Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)
#41Agreed. It won't be an entirely manual process. There are services out there like Zemanta who do a good job of automatically tagging text.