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Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

googleblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#2

Post by zach »

Congrats to Metaweb and Applied Minds. Those guys are uniformly brilliant and it's great to see Google sharing the deep interest Metaweb has in curating a great, accessible repository of semantic data.

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#5

Post by izendejas »

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 there is no standard. Well, Google just solved those. With a dominant market share, you don't need someone to agree on a standard, you just force them to--or else they lose out to competition. And as far as the ROI in tagging web pages? Well, what's the ROI on SEO? This will bring about a new form of SEO, except that Google can now undercut many of the search results and answer many of the queries directly--so that'll get interesting... and I'm sure Wolphram Alpha certainly agrees.

Google was also smart to buy Metaweb in order to give web app developers a good reason to use their entities and just FB's open graph entities.

Congrats to the Metaweb team! Freebase + Wikipedia are two of the best gifts to humanity.

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#7

Post by csytan »

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…

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.

Re: Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)

#10

Post by izendejas »

csytan wrote: post #7
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…

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 personal site is, and so on.

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