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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>Congrats to the Metaweb team! Freebase + Wikipedia are two of the best gifts to humanity.
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.
Imagine if we could do this with all of Google's data (A very cool search engine built on top of Freebase):<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497100" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497100</a>
That is so cool (I think). I have been waste deep in Freebase for a few weeks for a work task.<p>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.
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.<p>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?<p>Metaweb briefly mentioned at the end of this article in Wikipedia:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)</a>
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.
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.
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.<p>Glad you got your payout, guys. Hopefully now the full power of Google's infrastructure can make Freebase fast and enormous.
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!
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.