Raw

This will no doubt be is all over the blogosphere pronto, but Daniel Hillis's Metaweb company is in the process of decloaking their first offering, freebase. Not yet visible, but from what Tim O'Reilly says it sounds like Google Base on crack. Cool.

I do have to take issue with the good Mr. O'Reilly on one point - his contrast between a bottom-up approach in freebase and the opposite in the W3C's approach is almost diametrically out, he's seriously mislocating his elbow here. The Semantic Web languages were designed to support distributed, bottom-up development (although centralised and top-down also also possible where appropriate) - c.f. fractal ontologies. The " messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions" is a feature. On the other hand, freebase appears to be essentially a centralised database. Not that individual cases matter, let's just see how this one can be wired in...

Nova Spivack welcomes Metaweb to the "two-horse space", and Henry Story says "Soon O'Reilly is going to use the word Web 3.0, just you wait and see!". Oh yeah..? Next I suppose Dave Winer will be inviting RDF into his den...

PS. In his report, Tim Finin spotted a quote in the NYT's report on this which supports my point above:

The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world’s digital information is a fundamental shift away from today’s World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog.

Bear in mind the Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web, featuring linked digital data stored separately on millions of computers, in which search engines will start to look like antiquated card catalogs.

PPS. A SWEO challenge - is there a doc which could help with the references to meta tags etc here?