In the context of business information, we’ve talked lately about how information wants to be free, yet structured, but what about doing that for all content?  Google immediately comes to mind. Google created the ultimate database based on the simplest of missions: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.  One of the things that makes Google so ubiquitous is their ability to insulate the user from such a complex task, yet, even Google, has not delivered a way to assemble all of those pieces of information so that they can be consumed by other applications.  Over the last several months I have been watching as a new service by MetaWeb called Freebase, has evolved around their mission to build an “open database of the world’s information.”   What makes their approach interesting is their openness (data is freely available to anyone under an open license) and that it provides structure and context to each piece of information forming a web of interconnected relationships.  Freebase is enabling their users upload content and then to create their own data types and categories much like many Web 2.0 applications allow content tagging.  The Freebase “types” enable developers to link content across many topics to provide context for various queries in an effort to get the user exactly what they are hoping to find.  For example you could enter “U2″ into a search engine in an attempt to find  the Irish rock band U2 and get back U2 the band, U2 the spy plane or U2 a German submarine and thousands of other  (likely irrelevant) results.  The example below shows the semantic relationships around a single Musical Artist.  Each type has many properties to help describe a particular artist-all of which can be used to more efficiently and precisely deliver search results.

However, the ideal of a semantic web still has a long way to go.  There are still plenty of issues and challenges associated with this effort.  One recently uploaded list to Freebase is called “Female CEOs of public companies in order of Market Cap“.  At first glance the list seems solid and accurate; however after some quick research it is easy to see that two of the first five entries are out of date (Meg Whitman is no longer CEO of eBay and Nance Dicciani is also not the CEO of Honeywell).  It will be interesting to watch and see if this information set and others can truly self-heal via a community like Freebase.

Whether you call it a folksonomy or social tagging or Web 3.0, adding the flexibility and insight of these new connections not typically found in traditional relational databases will enable a wealth of new applications to be built around Freebase.  Developers are already drawn to the lack of licensing traditionally found with large masses of information and as a result new applications are being added daily.

Let us know your thoughts on free information services like Freebase and what applications you’d like to see built using semantic technology.