
Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase) - aschobel
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/deeper-understanding-with-metaweb.html
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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.

~~~
rmc
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>

~~~
_pius
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.)

~~~
joe_the_user
I think you do need a universal ontology if you want to make the kind of
progress the semantic web people talk about. If you just have a bunch of
small, separately created ontologies, the situation can indeed seem great
until each expands. Then the intersections and ambiguities become huge.

Sure, if you weren't concerned exactness and lack of ambiguity, you could
expand the world of triples into a giant, poorly organized collection of
information. It would be kind of like the web. The approach "works" but we,
uh, already have the web.

Also, the Doctorow document excellent. Anyone expected naive metadata to be
extensible should have a reply to it.

~~~
_pius
_If you just have a bunch of small, separately created ontologies, the
situation can indeed seem great until each expands. Then the intersections and
ambiguities become huge._

Inferencing solves this problem.

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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.

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espadagroup
Imagine if we could do this with all of Google's data (A very cool search
engine built on top of Freebase):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497100>

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mark_l_watson
That is so cool (I think). I have been waste deep in Freebase for a few weeks
for a work task.

There is a lot of cruft in Freebase, but with some manual effort and some
automation, it is a good source of a wide variety of information. Depending on
application, DBpedia and GeoNames are other good resources for structured
data.

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carbocation
The name didn't immediately ring a bell until I Googled it: Metaweb ==
Freebase.

~~~
aschobel
I updated the title, thx

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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)>

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Zakuzaa
So we are going to see a lot of zero click info on Google. Like DuckDuckGo.
Good.

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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.

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epi0Bauqu
How much?

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sachinag
If they unlock the Freebase data and associate UPCs/EANs/other bar codes and
structured data around it (which Freebase has done in a hap-hazard fashion),
they could really do some pretty awesome stuff.

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KirinDave
For those of us who have worked closely with Metaweb's products and had a
professional relationship with them (Powerset, my previous employer pre-
acquisition, was fairly close to them back when we started out) over the past
few years, this is great to see. Metaweb has been providing several invaluable
services to everyone interested in NLP, Search, and smarter software in
general.

Glad you got your payout, guys. Hopefully now the full power of Google's
infrastructure can make Freebase fast and enormous.

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SeriousGuy
err interesting note Freebase powers some part of Bing Search

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_pius
Definitely a big congratulations to these folks. They've done great work and
it's definitely a great day for the promise of the Semantic Web.

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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!

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cybernytrix
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.

~~~
aantix
I haven't downloaded the data set for the fact that it doesn't look like the
accompanying MQL server is available for download. Am I correct on this?

MQL is sweet (e.g. give me all of Tom Cruise's movies since 1995 that have
cost over 10million dollars to make), but what good is the data dump if all I
can do is resort to simplistic SQL queries? MQL support is just as important
as the data itself.

I'm sure that I'm overlooking something simple as usual (shameless self-
deprecation reference in an attempt to hold myself less accountable in the
event that there's an easy solution available but I was just too lazy to find
it).

~~~
cybernytrix
AFAIK you need to process that data - put it into a graph db or a RDF store.
SQL/MQL/RDF/OWL are all just query languages that can query the data. BTW
there is no open source MQL implementation.

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SeriousGuy
wow I was interested in joining Freebase, now I need to join google!

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c1sc0
Maybe a smart pre-emptive strike against twitters annotations?

~~~
neilk
I have no idea what you mean by this. Twitter is not trying to become a
database or Wikipedia. Tweets are short communications and signalling, which
they want to enrich with more data for specialized applications.

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est
Most amazing one:

<http://www.freebase.com/labs/parallax/>

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c00p3r
Another try to compete with wikipedia? This time it might be successful.
Wikipedia lacks structure and API to fetch different content types.

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startuprules
Search. Monopoly.

