Re: Metaweb joins Google

It's not hard to find reasons to be cynical about Google's move,
mostly around the potential for them to make Freebase their own in the
sense of hiding it within their infrastructure and only exposing
proprietary, user-oriented interfaces - the temptation for Google to
"improve" aspects of the system, moving them away from standards.

There's certainly some coincidence between Google's aim of being the
one true search engine, and Freebase as *the* knowledge base.

But Metaweb were relatively quick to expose standards-based
interfaces, and their adoption of a CC license for the data has to be
commended. Another thing they got right was in picking up on the ways
people were spontaneously (well, not W3C-led anyway) using data on the
Web - wikis, tagging, folksonomies etc. (You could maybe say Metaweb
had similar aims at the core, but when it came to end-users pretty
much the opposite end of the spectrum from Cyc).

I agree totally with what Aldo and others have said about this being
great for getting the notion of graph out there, the right companies
do now seem to be getting on the bandwagon.

So worst case scenario I'd say would be for Google to play with the
tech, make things more proprietary, not get interesting results and
for the whole thing to wither as a failed experiment.

Best case maybe we see Google rapidly become a huge blob near the
centre of the linked data cloud, and additionally (and probably more
significantly) demonstrate one way the Web of Data can be useful by
enhancing their search engine.

Personally I'm optimistic, and congratulations to both Metaweb and
Google. Should be interesting...

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Saturday, 24 July 2010 07:35:49 UTC