Isaac Asimov Entry on Freebase

With Google’s aquisition of Metaweb the searchopolis takes a stake in the seemingly-forever-emerging Semantic Web, a concept with endlessly verbose standards and few demonstrable applications for all it promises. I yawned when I read of Google’s move, remembering a few years ago when I explored Freebase, Metaweb’s semantic database. I even tried downloading and playing with their semantically-rich database version of Wikipedia… and was really unimpressed. It was 3GB of schemas, xml, and ontology, seeming to add up to little of practical value.

Was I ever wrong. I returned to the database this last weekend and found a community of several hundred users maintaining a browsable schema, with some of these volunteer ontologists having contributed millions of facts to the database the same way people devote thousands of hours to maintaining Wikipedia. On its surface, the database just seems like a bunch of web pages, you click through the associations as you would on Wikipedia, with articles and entries leading into each other in standard hypertext fashion.

Where the value of semantic associations comes into play is when you experiment with the Freebase Query Editor, where you can search for data in explicit detail, tailoring it to your specific needs. For example, with the following query I can get a list of computer scientists born before 1950:

[{
  "b:type":        "/computer/computer_scientist",
  "date_of_birth": null,
  "date_of_birth< =": "1950",
  "education": [{
    "institution": null,
    "id":          null
  }],
  "name":          null,
  "id":            null,
  "type":          "/people/person"
}]

Pager, Tamagotchi and Psion Organiser

Pager, Tamagotchi and Psion Organiser
Credit: steve greer

Every time a new device comes around, the self-proclaimed techsperts start declaring the death of older devices. It’s boring to keep hearing critics say things like the Smartphone is the “death of laptops,” the Kindle is the “death of books,” and the iPad is the “death of PCs” and the “death of e-Readers.”

Eken M001 Android Tablet
Credit: mrbill

I can see the iPad being nice for lying on the couch, flipping through websites and comic books, or playing relaxing video games that aren’t too intense. As appealing a toy as it is, I don’t find it very hard to resist buying the Android tablet equivalent. I get whatever it could provide me between my existing devices, my laptop, e-reader, and Smartphone. Like a lot of other technologies on display at Best Buy, the tablet pc doesn’t fit any particular need in my life.

In the tradition of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell…

Abstraction Guy

“We really need a Factory Pattern for that Factory Pattern.”
Pros: Produces really really really loosely-coupled systems.
Cons: Output will never escape the layers of code.

Buzzword Bumbler

“This enterprise needs to move to a service-oriented paradigm in the cloudplex to encapsulate polydactylism!”
Pros: Impresses the heck out of people who don’t know better.
Cons: Someone will eventually call bullshit.
Note: For fun try putting two in the same room to watch them throw nonsense at one another.

Bleeding Edge

“Why don’t we just replace the company phonelist spreadsheet with a FOAF browser plugged into an object database?”
Pros: Thinks outside the box.
Cons: Must regularly be beaten back into the box.