[freebase - like crack for databases]

According to Jon Udell "Freebase is like Wikipedia in the sense that it’s an open data project. But where Wikipedia is a database of unstructured articles, Freebase is a database of categorized and related items. You can use it to add or edit items and, more ambitiously, to create or extend the categories themselves."

Esther Dyson explains: "It's basically an extensive tool to represent the world in a way that can be understood by computers as well as by people. The excitement is not that it can support better search, but that it can support more powerful applications. Rather than present information to humans so that they can figure out what to do with it, it represents information in a way that lets computers manipulate it.

For example, suppose you want to plan a trip to Moscow (or imagine your own favorite information-intensive task that involves integrating information from several sources, making a few transactions, and ending up with some complex task accomplished). You may search for information about venues and hotels. You will check your schedule to see what appointments you have to plan, and perhaps look at Google or Yandex maps to minimize your travel (and time spent in traffic). But in the end, you don't really want search results: You want to book hotels, schedule appointments, communicate with the people you're going to visit."


O'Reilly sums it up nicely: "While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web."