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Content Tagged with semantic + Web2.0

Staff researcher David François Huynh has created an interesting tool for browsing semantic database Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Written up by ZDNet's Oliver Marks, the video Huynh recorded demonstrating Parallax (below) will knock your socks off.

Unfortunately, actually using Parallax demonstrates just how far from solid Freebase, one of the semantic web's poster children, really is. The idea is to allow you to apply multiple filters for your searches and embed live charts in a blog. It's a beautiful idea, check out the video.

Here's the video below, if you find yourself saying "get to the point already," then skip to about 1:30 in the timeline.

Unfortunately, when we tried out a number of searches in Parallax, very few subjects were well populated at all. We found duplicate subject titles where one held solid data and the other didn't, but even that was a best case scenario. In search after search, we found next to nothing in Freebase.

The example above is nice, but let's say I want to find out something about black women scientists. No luck. History of the internet? Not much information there. Venture Capitalists? Blank profile pages.

This ought to work. Freebase has taken more than $50 million in venture investments, they have a small army of volunteer and computer scientist contributors, they've got robots pumping their database with information automatically. There are now 60% more articles in Freebase than there are in English Wikipedia. So what's the problem?

We wrote last week about ontological concerns about the semantic web, but Parallax shows that there are more superficial problems. An unfriendly UI has been Freebase's excuse for a long time, despite recent improvements to it. We love the idea of the semantic web, but give it's grand daddy website a usable UI like Parallax and we're left questioning just how much there really is inside Freebase anyway.

For an alternate view see Alex Iskold's Freebase: Dispelling the Skepticism, and some fault here may lay in the coolness ratio of the video to the Parallax app, but for now - we feel inclined to look elsewhere for the "semantic web killer app."

Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies.

Wikipedia is an incredible monument to human creativity and collaboration, but as one era of innovation passes into another - semantic web advocates want to augment the huge human input into the web with machine learning. The semantically enriched common database Freebase announced today that it will soon reach the milestone of 4 million topics added to its collection. That's 60% more than English Wikipedia's 2,445,041 articles and almost half the size of Wikipedia's full 10 million articles in 250 different languages.

What is Freebase? It's a database of information that's organized by people and machines and is particularly well suited for machine reading. You're not a machine - so why should you care? Read on.

What You Can Do With Freebase

Semantic web expert and RWW contributor Alex Iskold spelled out the value of Freebase in great detail here in May. The long and short of it though is that Freebase learns fast through a combination of automated information harvesting and machine and human organization. It collects information from sources like Wikipedia and MusicBrainz and from user uploads and edits.

Programmatic access to that now structured data allows all kinds of mashups to be built that "know things." Check out, for example:

• Taught or Not - a cute little game that tests your knowledge of who influenced who throughout the history of thinkers.


• Shot or Not - another game that tests your knowledge of the causes of death of various famous people throughout history.


• Random Walk Through Influences - a little app that displays the chain of historical influence around any artist whose name you enter.


• Pull Quotes - If you have any interest in politics, check this out - it's awesome!


• Powerset - the Natural Language search engine acquired by Microsoft last week uses Freebase, too.

Seriously, Though

Obviously most of these are relatively frivolous use cases. Are there serious powerful use cases for Freebase yet? We're not entirely sure. There are big gaps in the data, which is understandable, but the interface is so much harder to use than Wikipedia's that there's reason to be concerned about expectations of substantial human editing. The interface was much improved this summer and is now far more usable, but it's still harder than it needs to be.

We've certainly got our questions about Freebase, but we're excited about what Metaweb is doing with it. They are smart, well funded and aiming high. The community there deserves congratulations on growing to 4 million reusable articles, something that the the celebrated English Wikipedia community can only aspire to.