Today Danny Hillis' Metaweb launched its first product, Freebase. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) From site:
Freebase is an open, shared database of the world's knowledge....
Free + Database = Freebase
It's about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. Its a big job and we're just getting started.
How free?
Really free. We want to make it possible for you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups and applications without worrying about restrictive corporate licenses. All data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. We only ask that you link back to us.
A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information....
He says [Freebase]...will help develop a realm frequently described as the “semantic Web” — a set of services that will give rise to software agents that automate many functions now performed manually in front of a Web browser....
Mr. Hillis envisions a centralized repository that...can be extended freely by those wishing to share their information widely.
On the Web, there are few rules governing how information should be organized. But in...Freebase, information will be structured to make it possible for software programs to discern relationships and even meaning.
For example, an entry for California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, would be entered as a topic that would include a variety of attributes or “views” describing him as an actor, athlete and politician — listing them in a highly structured way in the database.
That would make it possible for programmers and Web developers to write programs allowing Internet users to pose queries that might produce a simple, useful answer rather than a long list of documents....
The system will also make it possible to transform the way electronic devices communicate with one another, Mr. Hillis said. An Internet-enabled remote control could reconfigure itself automatically to be compatible with a new television set by tapping into data from Freebase....
All of the information in Freebase will be available under a license that makes it freely shareable, Mr. Hillis said. In the future, he said, the company plans to create a business by organizing proprietary information in a similar fashion....
Contributions already added into the Freebase system include descriptive information about four million songs from Musicbrainz, a user-maintained database; details on 100,000 restaurants supplied by Chemoz; extensive information from Wikipedia; and census data and location information.
A number of private companies, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, have indicated that they are willing to add some of their existing databases to the system, Mr. Hillis said.
Also see Tiim O'Reilly's article at O'Reilly Radar:
While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web....
But once you understand a bit about what metaweb is doing, you realize just how remarkable it is. Metaweb has slurped in the contents of several of the web's freely accessible databases....It then turns its users loose on not just adding more data items but making connections between them by filling out meta tags that categorize or otherwise connect the data items, using a typology that can be extended by users, wiki-style....
Comment. This could be extremely useful --to make search more intelligent, to create semantically-enhanced mirrors of existing repositories, to host uncopyrightable facts in interconnectable forms, to make OA data manipulable and queryable (not just accessible), and to enhance eprints by linking them to that kind of live data, to name just a few. I'll be watching for specifically scientific and scholarly uses of Freebase. If you notice any, please drop me a line.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/09/2007 11:55:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
