Microsoft Live Labs launches political meme tracker
Webware.com —
... that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days. Each item can be drilled down into a little further which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places. Each of these places and names also gets its own page that lists related news, which makes it a very topical experience. The information itself comes from Freebase, the ...
Political Streams: Microsoft Live Labs web site tracks political dialog
Download Squad —
... Each item also has a graph that shows how much "attention" a person or place has received in the last month. Political Streams draws its information from the links between blog post and news articles and from information found in Freebase, a community-driven information database. ...
RDFa is now a W3C Recommendation
SitePoint —
... SearchMonkey recommends the use of these RDF vocabularies:
dc - Dublin Core
foaf - Friend of a Friend
vcard
vcal - Calendar events
review
sioc - Semantically Interlinked Online Communities
gr - GoodRelations: Product price specification, delivery and payment etc.
dbpedia - Semantic Web version of wikipedia
fb - freebase - structured wiki with an amazing interface
Twine goes fully public with next-generation bookmarking
VentureBeat —
... , who employ people to build information pages and search results. On the other hand, Twine’s scheme for organizing information could involve too much human interaction, in which case a more stable database like Metaweb’s Freebase, a sort of semi-automated Wikipedia, might prevail. Other, as-yet-unknown companies could appear and do a better job at the same thing. ...
10 Semantic Apps to Watch - One Year Later
ReadWriteWeb —
... Freebase is an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it. ...
Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies
ReadWriteWeb —
... Another big player in the semantic databases space is a company called Metaweb, which created Freebase.
In its present form, Freebase is just a fancier and more structured version of Wikipedia - with RDF inside and less information
in total. The overall goal of Freebase, however, is to build a Wikipedia equivalent of the world's information.
Such a database would be enormously powerful because it could be queried exactly - much like relational databases. So once
again the promise is to build much better search. ...
ETech: I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. —
My favorite conference of the year, ETech kicked off its general sessions today and its looking as stimulating as ever! While the topics covered by the conference have become less hard-core geeky, they have become more green and more broad. Sustainable topics, the environment and becoming better global citizens are just a few of the topics that have been struck this morning. ETech continues to make me think, which is the primary reason I keep coming back for more.
The first session I'd like to share with you was Toby Segaran and Jesper Anderson's "I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can ...
Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. —
The first session I attended today was John Wilbanks' "Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons" presentation. John talked about the process of establishing the Science Commons and how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges. John first pointed out that Metcalfe's Law works for both networked computers and documents. But, he went on to extend the law to more general data as well -- something I've believed in and espoused for a number of years now.
However, the science world hasn't created efficient means of communicating knowledge as ...
Google News Timeline
Google Operating System —
... The search box is very powerful, but you first need to pick a category from the drop-down. Google lets you add different sources: blogs, newspapers and it shows structured information from Wikipedia and Freebase. ...
New From Google Labs: Similar Images and Google News Timeline
ReadWriteWeb —
... The new News Timeline also features relevant photos and YouTube videos, which play right in the timeline interface. Interestingly, you can also chose from a number of features newspapers, magazines, and blogs, though the selection here is currently limited to only two newspapers and a handful of magazines and blogs. The timeline will also include media files from Freebase. ...
Google spotlights news timeline, labs work
Webware.com —
... The interface requires people to select what type of information they're seeking--newspapers, music, movies, prizes, blogs, and more. Some content comes from Wikipedia or the Freebase project to organize information on the Web that's structured with descriptive data such as dates; other content is licensed from organizations such as The Associated Press for news photos, Time magazine for its covers, or various ...
Glue API Links Data from Popular Social & Semantic Sites
ReadWriteWeb —
... demoed in three apps: Glue Stream, Glue Quilt, and Glue Spider.
Sponsor
Glue Stream is "Glue Live" and shows what is happening on Glue in real time. Glue Quilt shows trending topics over the past 7 days. Glue Spider shows connections between people and sites around the web.
Glue's API is part of an expanding group of semantic web APIs such as Reuters' OpenCalais, Dapper, Freebase, Evri, and Zemanta, all of which helped develop links and relationships ...
Spicing Up Your Blog: Apture vs. Zemanta Balloons
ReadWriteWeb —
... Most of the links Zemanta inserts are to FreeBase, which is like a machine-readable version of Wikipedia but is also a noble, well-funded, mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are real hit and miss. ...
Hexagon.cc Turns BitTorrent Into a Community Playground
NewTeeVee —
... Finally, the semantic data adds an interesting twist to Hexagon.cc. Users that upload a torrent get suggestions from Freebase.com as to which topic to add to their torrent’s description. This will make it easier for Hexagon.cc to find the content that users are searching for, but it could also in the future be used by third-party web services or torrent clients to automatically suggest downloads based on structured data. ...
Is Smart.fm’s Facebook app may be smarter than you think
VentureBeat —
... What Smart.fm says it really wants to do here is demonstrate the way it can take structured data, in this case your friends’ profiles, and process it in a way that creates questions that make sense — so it understands how to formulate a movie-related question versus a status-related question. The company is building another app that tests knowledge from the Freebase database. Looking further ahead, Smart.fm says it wants to be the site where you can learn “anything and everything.” That’s a tall order, but at least one it ...
Bing Visual Search
Google Operating System —
... Bing's visual galleries are more polished than the results generated by Google Squared, but Bing only shows galleries for a small number of queries like "popular TV shows" or "world leaders" and it's likely that the information is obtained from structured data sources like Freebase. ...
Factual: Applied Semantics Co-Founder Launches A Repository For Open Data
TechCrunch —
... with their specialties and which insurance they accept, to a list of farmer’s markets across the U.S.
Elbaz believes that good data leads to good decisions. So he designed Factual to self-correct and improve its data over time. Once he has a rich source of structured data, that will start to become very appealing to developers, who can access Factual’s data through its API .
Of course, he is not the only one trying to o this. Danny Hillis at Freebase has a two-and-a-half year head start. Everything in Wolfram Alpha is highly ...
Factual wants to be the center of the web’s open data
VentureBeat —
... Freebase is a project with similar goals. Users can view and edit data on the site, and the data is also usable in other web services and applications. But Elbaz says Factual has a very different approach to open, structured data, and a visit to the two sites seems to bear this out — for starters, Freebase doesn’t offer Factual’s massive, embeddable tables. ...
Factual Makes Publishing Open Data Easy
ReadWriteWeb —
... by Google in 2003 and became one of the core component of the search giant's AdSense contextual advertising product. Factual, which is mostly geared towards developers, is somewhat similar to Freebase, though Factual allows for a more free-form approach to building a database than Freebase. Factual provides users and developers with tools to create, contribute and mash up open data on any subject. ...


