Metaweb and Freebase

Today I have seen from my subscriptions the rise of the attention to the soon-to-be-launched Freebase which is the first product that will be lanched by Danny Hillis’ Metaweb. I see a few point of contacts with RadarNetworks, another enterpirse that is getting hot in these days.

They both aim to give a new spark (and hopefully real life) to the term Semantic Web and
reading from the tea leaves of RSS it seems that this will be an interesting source of innovation in the coming months, perhaps a new battle field for the enterprises that are going to dominate a post-google internet (It won’t be easy nor fast though).

Going back to Freebase, while there is not much available at the moment, what seemes notable to me are the open job posts on Metaweb corporate site: I never seen an employer asking candidates to submit answers to a few questions together with the ususal resume and cover letter.

These are for the Data Understanding Engineer position (the one I find most interesting):

1. What is your favorite time of day? Why?
2. Mark V. Shaney is an ancient Usenet bot that generated realistic
   (for some value of reality) prose that fooled many educated people
   into thinking a human was the author. (See
   http://groups.google.com/group/net.singles/msg/531b9a2ef72fe58 for
   an example.) Describe succinctly an approach, algorithm, or
   technique you would use to automatically distinguish Mark’s prose
   from human prose, assuming you don’t have access to his compiled
   program or source code.
3. What’s most broken with SQL as an API of database access? How would
   you fix or replace it? What would a representation of your personal
   music collection information in your new, improved design allow you
   to do that you couldn’t easily do with a standard SQL database?

technorati tags:metaweb, semanticweb