I think this is very cool. I heard Powerset’s latest demo was pulling Freebase data. I went on Powerlabs and it pulls up Genealogy of Influence data for “Who influenced Thomas Jefferson?” above the other results from Wikipedia.
While this makes me excited about the future of both companies, it reminds me of a question I asked on this blog few months ago (Metadata spam on the semantic web):
I think it will be an interesting problem to block spammers, if something like Freebase or Twine becomes as useful as Wikipedia is now: as a trusted knowledge repository and therefore highly ranked search result.
This will especially be the case when spammers can figure out how to reverse engineer data to jump to the top of a search engine results page.
April 24, 2008 at 4:59 pm
[...] was impressed last week by the Powerset Wikisearch demo, hooking into Freebase data using just one search bar. But after watching my friends use it, I [...]
May 23, 2008 at 5:10 am
Good morning Mike,
hope life is inspiring.
Sorry this is not meant as a post but I couldn’t find a contact address so I use this vehicle.
I just wanted to draw your attention to a new genealogy browser I am about to put together. It is a very early version so for sure still a lot to do. The whole project is my prefuse flare greenfield project – so far things went smooth, looks like Jeff Heer has put something great together again.
http://goosebumps4all.net/goi/test.html
cheers
martin
ps By the way, do you know why peers are handled differently than influenced and influenced by person at freebase.com – at least the following query
[
{
"influenced" : [],
“influenced_by” : [],
“name” : “Carl Jung”,
“peers” : [],
“type” : “/influence/influence_node”
}
]
doesn’t returns Carl’s peers. I am sure I could figure out why but this is sort of ugly in a way …