This link has been bookmarked by 10 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Mar 2007, by Orlin Monad.
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Martin Lindnerhuman web > database > In the middle is Metaweb, which has the flexibility of text with the power of the database.
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Howard SilvermanNow Danny has a new company, Metaweb, which announced its first
product (Freebase) on Friday: The world hasn't changed forever, but
Freebase is a milestone in the journey towards representing meaning in
computers. -
21 Mar 07
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14 Mar 07
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The problems here (there have to be some, of course) are twofold, in my view. First, the "ontologies" (epistomologies, actually) are not neutral. Compare and contrast to the politically contentious history (and perpetually continuing debates) over things like the Dewey or Library of Congress cataloging systems for library holdings. Second, especially in these new digital media, the practically supported access methods are not neutral either (by analogy, Google dabbles in everything from small business fairness to geopolitics when they tweak PageRank).
Those two concerns, when combined, should give us serious pause when the business model involves an asymmetric (between supplier and consumers) siloing of the raw-data and control over the access methods. DNS is arguably a disaster because the initially innocent property rights it created have imposed themselves as the main way to refer to content (links point not to content but to the private property where it is hoped a copy of that content is kept). Search engines generally, and Hillis' thing no less, are a more subtle extension of that problem. -
There is one thing which will determine the continued existence of the human species, and that is its Net Creativity. In other words, the amount of USEFULNESS we contribute to the Unvierse in exchange for the resources we consume.
Making all the information available ALL the TIME to EVERYBODY simply increases the rate of consumption in exchange for understanding which is only needed by a few, at the expense of the planet's resource base. -
Another 'Device' or 'Invention', to be endorsed by 'Govern'ment, in order to increase our rate of Consumption of resources under the premise of making Life easier to understand and deal with all the other Devices.
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Reprise: Emergent structure vs. intelligent design
This all reflects a fundamental if still incoherent debate. There's one school of thought that says that if you just collect enough data and throw enough algorithms at it, the inherent structure - and the understanding of that structure - will emerge. After all, that's what happens with human beings, though it takes a decade or more. (And in some people, the process even continues into old age.) The recent explosion of tagging is taken as evidence of this: With their tags, users are creating implicit relationships among online objects, and indeed, complex webs of relationships are emerging, with nodes, clusters and other rich structures. But the relationships themselves are poorly defined, other than strong or weak - and possibly, links made by my friends or by trusted authorities, vs. links created by anyone.
By contrast, the opposing point of view says we have to hand-design the relationships and structures - like the complex database schema about cars.
Where Metaweb differs from that approach - and from "ontology" projects such as Cyc - is this: Metaweb's creators have "intelligently designed" the grammar of how the relationships are specified, but they are relying on the wisdom (or the specific knowledge) and the efforts of the crowd to create the actual content - not just specific data, but specific kinds of relationships between specific things.
Metaweb has a process (including editing and approval) for people both to define relationships, and to use those relationships to describe specific instances.
At least for now, the Metaweb approach is more likely to yield short-term results that look intelligent.
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In short, Metaweb has an easy grammar for extending itself.
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In the middle is Metaweb, which has the flexibility of text with the power of the database.
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At the other end, you can have an Oracle (or MySQL) database with multiple tables.
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At one end, you have the World Wide Web, plain text or even Wikipedia.
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So you can go beyond finding information; you can direct a computer to manipulate it on your behalf.
That's the big win: not better search, but the ability actually to leverage the information and go beyond search to action. In a way, when you do things (as opposed to searching for information) online, you're designing a solution or constructing a complex situation. If the software knows enough to fit the pieces together with some brief instructions from you, that's a big win.
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It's basically an extensive tool to represent the world in a way that can be understood by computers as well as by people. The excitement is not that it can support better search, but that it can support more powerful applications. Rather than present information to humans so that they can figure out what to do with it, it represents information in a way that lets computers manipulate it.
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The world hasn't changed forever, but Freebase is a milestone in the journey towards representing meaning in computers.
The company calls Freebase a "data commons": The public is invited to add data and even structure.
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Words are not in themselves carriers of meaning, but merely pointers to shared understandings.
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