langreiter.com plain, simple: 2007-03-09-metaFree

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2007-03-09-metaFree

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6498 days AGO

So Metaweb is behind Freebase ... interesting, interesting.

Not having invented it himself, Dave Winer summarizes: "It seems like a secret rehash of Google Base, which hasn't exactly been revolutionary."

If you happen to disagree wrt/ the general noteworthiness of such systems, you could certainly do worse than to have a look at Structured Wikis like Gobi or System One or their close relatives, [create Semantic Wiki]s like Semantic MediaWiki.

And yes, reading Tim O'Reilly's enthusiastic prose today is slightly painful.

As an aside, I don't think the "Let's build a DataWikipedia operated by a private company" approach makes any sense; extracting structured data from Wikipedia where it exists (and heck, there exists a lot already!) is a much more interesting one.