2010-07-21

Metaweb and Freebase





Welcome to Metaweb

Metaweb is a service that help you build your website around entities and not just words. What's an entity? Watch this video...



What is Metaweb?

Metaweb is a service that makes it dramatically easier for bloggers and site owners to aggregate content about a specific topic – like Tom Cruise, The Da Vinci Code, or San Francisco – and to surface related content in new and powerful ways.
Metaweb is organized around topics, or entities, which are unique, unambiguous concepts with their own URLs. In general, they are much more precise than keywords, and they carry a lot more information. Right now we catalog about 12M entities, in categories spanning movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies, and more.
For each of these entities we collect rich metadata and links to quality content feeds around the web. And then we make that all available to you via our blogger tools and developer
[...]

What is TopicBlocks?

TopicBlocks is a unique and easy way to add images, facts, news, and other related content from across the Web to your blog posts or articles. Just select a topic – like Lindsay Lohan or Avatar and quickly get rich, relevant, free content to keep your readers engaged.
[...]

How do I use TopicBlocks?

Using TopicBlocks is easy. Just choose a topic (like an actor or a movie) and TopicBlocks will automatically grab content related to that topic – images, trailers, reviews, news, social network pages, and more – and package it into a single block. To add it to your blog post or article, just copy and paste the snippet of code we give you. To get started, visit the TopicBlocks homepage.



What is Freebase?

Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data of more than 12 million entities.
An entity is a single person, place, or thing. Freebase connects entities together as a graph.
Ways to use Freebase:
  • Use Freebase's Ids to uniquely identify entities anywhere on the web
  • Query Freebase's data using MQL
  • Build applications using our API or Acre, our hosted development platform
Freebase is also a community of thousands of data-lovers, working together to improve Freebase's data.

Is Freebase a wiki?

No, though it shares some similarities with open wiki projects:
  • Freebase is a free source of information
  • Freebase is a collaborative project, and Freebase data may be edited by anyone
  • Most of the data in Freebase is openly licensed under Creative Commons
However:
  • Freebase does not run on wiki software, but on a graph database that represents structured data
  • Most wikis arrange information primarily in the form of text-based articles, while Freebase houses information in a structured, machine-readable database format
(Note that although this documentation is part of a wiki, the Freebase documentation wiki is not Freebase.)

Is Freebase a Semantic Web project?

Yes, Freebase is part of the Semantic Web. We emit Linked Open Data (via RDF) for all our entities, and are involved in various SemWeb projects/communities/etc.
Collected from: FAQ - Freebase



July 16, 2010, 4:20 pm

Google Buys Metaweb to Improve Search Results

Google said Friday that in an effort to improve these tricky types of search queries, it was buying Metaweb, a San Francisco start-up that says it makes Web sites smarter.

[...]

Google has recently added features to improve search results when people have specific questions. Type “Sarah Jessica Parker birthday” into Google, for instance, and on top of the search results, Google lists the actress’s birthday based on information it has pulled from other sites.
Metaweb will help Google do the same thing for more complicated queries, like “colleges on the West Coast with tuition under $30,000,” according to a blog post by Jack Menzel, director of product management at Google.


Sources
Metaweb - Connect your site to the web's best sources
http://www.metaweb.com/
YouTube - Welcome to Metaweb
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJfrNo3Z-DU&feature=player_embedded#!
Metaweb - Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.metaweb.com/faq
What is Freebase? - Freebase
http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/What_is_Freebase%3F
FAQ - Freebase
http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/FAQ
Google Buys Metaweb to Improve Search Results - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/google-buys-metaweb-to-improve-search-results/

Related
Official Google Blog: Deeper understanding with Metaweb
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/deeper-understanding-with-metaweb.html
Google Gets Semantic: Buys Metaweb
http://gigaom.com/2010/07/16/google-gets-semantic-buys-metaweb/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Metaweb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb
Semantic Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
Freebase (database) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)
Facebook, Google to Battle Over Smarter Web? - PCWorld
http://www.pcworld.com/article/201325/facebook_google_to_battle_over_smarter_web.html?tk=hp_new