Just got 5 of them, tell me if you're interested

(in principle, these are for "data fanatics and developers")

Send me one Francois at standardsociety@gmail.com

Cesar: I just sent it through Freebase, if you haven't received it, let me know and i'll send it through my email.

Any good?

Better than that... Freebase = a folksonomy-driven open global knowledge base = a wiki for tagged, structured data. I would be very surprised if there were no convergence between Freebase and Particls. I'll bet you a bottle of champagne you'll be using it soon.

I wonder if there is any way to integrate the two?

If an open, machine-readable Wikipedia existed, would you find it useful in the context of monitoring attention data, or would you just ignore it because it is too centralized to be called "Web 2.0"? Is Wikipedia useless just because there are blogs and tags and microformats all over the net? Can Wikipedia be suspected of exerting a "centralized control of the distributed web"?

Powerset apparently will use data from Freebase (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5541). Why wouldn't Particls do it too?

Oh man, I got the invite Francois, Freebase is pretty cool especially if you understand the whole meta universe and open data. I really think the site should be a little more dumb down if you would like the general public to actually start using it. (really hated saying that but you get what I mean)

Yeah I agree, but this is still alpha... I'm not sure when they are planning to open it up to the general public. Right now, looks like they are trying to get developers to play with the (nice) API.

Chris, just in case you haven't see it, here's a post in the Freebase blog about centralization: http://roblog.freebase.com/?p=7

Francois - I wouldn't mind an invite - I guess I should see exactly what it is you think we'll be using!

paul@faradaymedia.com

Francois... if you've still got invites. .. yes please!  dsoul@telus.net

Sent the invite to Paul successfully, but then got an "error contacting server" message when trying to create the invite for Bricoleur. Tried several times, will try again. Don't worry Bri, you'll get it soon and be allowed into the realm of ultimate knowledge  I don't think they have a black list...

Thanks for the invite Francois.

Pleasure. Hope you'll like the API

Thanks Francois... got it.

Great, enjoy

I guess a possible reason for using Freebase info would be to have a better grip of the semantics of watch words. If I am interested in "sailing competition", Particls should bring me articles about the America's cup, even if they don't contain the word "sailing competition". Can you do this without semantics?

Another example: I regularly get articles in my ticker about owl (the bird), just because I have "owl" (the language) in my watchlist. Would be nice if I could link the owl I have in mind to some topic in the Freebase ontology. Then, assuming that news items were categorised with respect to Freebase topics, Particls could filter them better and deliver more relevant info.

Francois that is a great idea

Are you a programmer?

Francois, that's the first time I've heard an example that has me peaked my interested in Freebase. Nice one. Now I am interested in an invite if anyone has one...

Richard - I think this is one of the first examples of a useful application of Freebase as well

Francois- i would go with being a 'data fanatic' not a developer. but do work with large enterprises on ontologies and metadata initiatives (dow jones client solutions). this looks fascinating. thanks for pointing out powerset's use as well. if you or someone else can spare send it my way: danielavbarbosa @gmail.com

Sent the invites to Richard and Daniela.
Chris: no, I don't think I qualify as a programmer; I did some development in Lisp and Prolog, but that was a long time ago. I spend most of my time now reading about and testing what others (like Particls, Powerset, Freebase, Hakia and DBpedia) are doing. So, I'm a bit like you: I like to track emerging trends, especially in the semantic area. What I surely don't have is your ability to turn ideas into businesses... Or if I have it, it hasn't shown up yet.

I almost forgot to mention my favorite startup, Radar Networks. Just love Nova Spivack's clarity (http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2007/07/enriching-the-c.html)

Francois, any chance you still have one invite available..? it would be really interesting to check this out. Metadata and ontologies are also ( like for daniela..) something related to some projects are working on..

If you do have one, could you please send it to flufje@gmail.com?

Sure Marf, just sent one out to your email. I'd be interested to know about your projects. I think I understand Daniela's interest (Dow Jones/Factiva taxonomies to deliver relevant news), just curious about yours.

I'm working on knowledge capturing/decision support for an online university and freebase+particls and tangler all add up to an excellent means to get something real from disparate data.

invites welcome!

woozoom@gmail.com

the follow-on to this is globally mapped needs/solutions tool.

Cheers!

Om


 

Hi Om. Since last November, invitations are no longer required to join Freebase. Everybody can join, query and enrich the database.

Here's a suggestion for version 2 of Particls: use the Freebase autocomplete function to help users find the most appropriate words to put in their watchlist.See blog post http://blog.freebase.com/?p=74 (which by the way mentions the concept of data portability).

Check the links to the discussion in the developer forum (tagging blog posts with Freebase topics, etc) and the demos in the "Freebase suggest" page (http://code.google.com/p/freebase-suggest/).

Francois,

VERY nice.. thanks for the links..