I’ve long been an admirer of Freebase. I like their approach to structured data, and context, about linking objects without necessarily putting a formal vocabulary in the way. Today, a flurry of tweets alerted me to the news that Google had bought Metaweb, the parent company for Freebase.
This is a big deal. I am not quite yet sure how the integration will happen and how Freebase data will start surfacing in Google results. The key for Google is to keep Freebase up and running and figure out how to pull that information into the core search function at Google. It is also entirely possible that this was a play for the excellent Freebase team, although that wouldn’t make complete sense, given the powerful platform and tools that the Freebase gang has created. It’s going to be fun to see how this evolves.
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- Google Tries Freebasing (GOOG, GS) (businessinsider.com)
- Google Gets Semantic: Buys Metaweb (gigaom.com)
2 Comments
Hi,
and google has ITA too. (Needlebase)
So say goodbye to data cleaning tools not owned by google.
Heiko Wengler
Thanks for the reminder. Now I wonder what the interest in curation tools is since both companies have really nice ones