
Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching - raju
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/technology/09data.html?ex=1331096400&en=a87d4f61e6052888&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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notabel
I'm going to go ahead and cross-post this from the other article about
freebase.

Disclaimer: I admire Daniel Hillis greatly, perhaps irrationally.

That said, Metaweb sounds amazing. If it takes off, it will be not so much a
useful product in itself, but an enabling technology for an entirely new class
of products. Imagine the possibilities that arise from having a relatively
complete, constantly evolving ontology of everything. All of those nifty
tricks that computational linguists and proof theoreticians can do over finite
domains, using very limited ontologies, become possible for all sorts of other
applications. Armed with an ontology that closely matches the real world, it
is finally possible to write code that can reason about the real world, rather
than just throw Bayes law at it and hope something useful falls out.

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pg
While DH is a smart guy, one of our rules of thumb at YC is to be skeptical of
any application containing the phrase "semantic web." It's a bad idea magnet
the way AI was in the 1980s.

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notabel
You're right, of course (and I need not point out the irony that DH was in
deep with AI), but I'm holding out hope (and not just because I'm bitter that
the Connection Machine failed!). The main reason (in my opinion) that the
semantic web has failed so far is the reliance on 1) predefined, very limited
ontologies, and 2) creator-generated rich metadata. Freebase seems to me like,
if not the solution, at least a good step in the right direction in terms of
addressing these. The real question, of course, will be whether a userbase
springs up to keep it up to date, and whether the logic behind it can keep it
reasonably self-consistent.

Here's to hoping.

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Readmore
I think it sounds like a pretty interesting idea. I'm excited to get my hands
on the API and see what kind of information you can really pull out of it.

