The Tetherless World Weblog

The ISWC 2008 keynote was presented by John Giannandrea (Metaweb Technologies Inc)

Semantic Web is based on a graph database which is not natively supported by relational database or column store. (More accurately, graph database is brought back by semantic web community while it was quite prospective in database community ten years ago.)

Ontology creation is a social process, and both freebase and semantic wiki are tools that enable users to create ontological vocabulary without worrying too much on building a comprehensive ontology. With such open-ended ontology, and effective query language is very important. Interesting enough, the query language of Freebase and Semantic Wiki shares similar flavor - they envision the semantic web as a instance store: where-clause simply describes a filter for instances, select-clause focus on retrieving the properties of the result instances.

Here are some facts about freebase:

* Scale of freebase: 156,000,000 assertions made; 1370 published types; 75 domains. (well, it is easy to see that most published types are well populated)

* view about the Semantic Web

Yes: graph model, identity, web based.

No: no description log; schema not ontology; a writable database!

* Freebase is not formal system cyc, OWL, sumo, true knowledge, and halo; nor google base.

* An industrial view on the relation between audience and complexity (inverse)

Google > Wikipedia > Del.icio.us > NY Times > dbpedia > cyc, OWL2

(Well, industrial people only care and learn what is needed to achieve their goals. They care more on functions, adoption and profits, and they are less picky on soundness and completeness.)

Freebase is dealing with an “identifier” web. While one thing may have quite some name, the names collaboratively contribute the semantics too. (yes, identity is a key problem for web application)

Greetings from ISWC 2008 by Li Ding