January 15, 2008 — 12:56 AM PST — by — Share This
One of the big names in the somewhat cloudy area of “semantic web,” Metaweb, just received a hefty round of funding from Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs - 42 million dollars. Metaweb is building Freebase, which is described as “an open, shared database of the world’s information.” This is their second round of funding; first one was $15 million back in 2006.
The promise behind Freebase (and semantic web in general) is an exciting one: by providing structure for the web’s data, it can be used as a better, more intelligent way to browse the web. For example, you can ask Freebase about “Films starring Jennifer Connelly and actors who have appeared in Steven Spielberg movies” and you will get a nice list of results. However, this is an official example taken from the FAQ; trying to get similar results on your own queries usually wont work as well.
At this stage, it’s very hard to decide whether Freebase is the real deal just by trying it out; and one can of course argue that Google’s approach also organizes web’s information quite well, albeit in a different way. Semantic web as an idea sounds great, but I haven’t yet seen many useful, practical implementations of it. However, this large round of funding proves that MetaWeb just might be onto something here.
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