Freebase for facts
Open, shared database of facts and some knowledge
I was reminded of MetaWeb's Freebase yesterday while in a bus. dev. meeting so I decided to check in on their progress. Wow. They have done an impressive job of organizing facts and providing access to them. If you are an information hound you'll appreciate what the team at MetaWeb has enabled and what their contributors have imported into this open source web database. Think Wikipedia meets database tables but the database is built for the web and is extensible by the community. Check out the search results for this query "Films starring Jennifer Connelly and actors who have appeared in Steven Spielberg movies" - if you can look past the presentation style - you start to get a glimpse of how powerful an open shared database is. There are still a few challenges regarding accuracy, latency and data duplication but this is pretty inspiring as is - that said I wouldn't say they are a 'database of the world's knowledge' as they claim at least not until they start justifying people's beliefs.
