This is a VERY interesting (note that it is still in alpha) attempt
to leverage "folksonomies" on a grander scale than has yet been attempted.
For those of you who want to explore -- I have 5 invites to give
away. The first 5 silklisters who ask (in private mail, please) get them.
Udhay
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/freebase_will_p_1.html
Freebase Will Prove Addictive
Danny Hillis' latest venture, Metaweb, is about to unveil its first
product, the aptly named freebase, tomorrow. 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.
Early visitors to the site might be inclined to dismiss it as an
early candidate for the Techcrunch deadpool. After all, is there
really room for what at first glance appears to be a bastard child of
wikipedia and the Open Directory Project, another site that purports
to collect and organize all the world's information in one place?
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,
including much of wikipedia, and song tracks from musicbrainz. 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.
<SNIP, more at the URL>
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
