Last week, John Markoff had this to say in The New York Times:

A new company founded by a longtime technologist [Danny Hillis] is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information…

On the Web, there are few rules governing how information should be organized. But in the Metaweb database, to be named Freebase, information will be structured to make it possible for software programs to discern relationships and even meaning.

For example, an entry for California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, would be entered as a topic that would include a variety of attributes or “views” describing him as an actor, athlete and politician — listing them in a highly structured way in the database.

A highly interesting concept, indeed. Certainly interesting enough to be picked up by Web guru Tim O’Reilly, who commented:

If Metaweb gets this right, this bottom up approach will build new connections between data, new categories and ways of thinking. It will likely be messy and contradictory for a while, but … they are building new synapses for the global brain.

One of the beauties of the Freebase proposition is its simple complexity. By allowing computers to do all the back-filling, the database grows exponentially faster. I don’t have to go to the New York page and say I’m from there and then to the New Zealand page and say I live there. I go to my page, say I’m from New York and live in New Zealand, and, bada bing bada boom, all three pages get updated.

The other, more important, beauty is Freebase’s recognition that relationships are as important, if not more so, as the things themselves. We as humans can only hope to understand the world through relationships. Think about how you describe, well, ANYTHING: “She’s Joe’s ex-girlfriend.” “The theater is two blocks west of State Street.” “This new database is better than the old ones.”

Relationships, always relationships. Even when we think we’re perceiving things independently, we’re comparing. “That person is skinny.” Relative to whom? “The movie was great.” In whose opinion?

If a tree falls… my friends, in the polarized field of our existence, we can only be in relation to something else.

So, yes, I applaud Freebase and Danny Hillis. As with Wikia’s search effort, though, Hillis remains focused on using the user in order to create the best possible database. The focus is on the database.

But the user is the reason for our work. The user is who benefits from the database. The user is at the center of the semantic web.

The reason the focus is on the database is because, as complex as it is to create, it’s still easier than understanding what drives a human being, which is, of course, the unique value proposition of VortexDNA.

I’m sure Danny Hillis and Jimbo Wales and Tim O’Reilly, none of whom is any slouch in the intellectual department, can see the possibilities of adapting search to the user. Between all of us, we’re nibbling at the edges of the semantic Web, nosing at the door. In the warped space-time continuum that is Internet development, it will be mere moments before our visions are reality.

Let’s just make sure we bring the user with us.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 2:23 am and is filed under Semantic Web, Search, Web 3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.