There has been some speculation that Freebase is a vehicle for Metaweb to prosper from its semantic web infrastructure when used for commercial purposes. As I recall, Metaweb raised over $40 million in Series B around the time they started building Freebase. The investment was led by Goldman Sachs. Metaweb’s seasoned investors were unlikely to [...]
Posts under ‘Ontology’
Google follows Microsoft’s lead towards intelligence
Being a fan of increased intelligence on the web, including Bing’s use of Powerset and True Knowledge, I enjoyed cnet’s report, “Google search gets answer highlights and events.”
Google now shows the following “The Empire State Building rises to 1250 ft (381 m) at the 102nd floor” in response to the classic semantic web test question.
Also, Google [...]
Time for the next generation of knowledge automation
In preparing for my workshop at the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas on November 5th, I have focused on the following needs in reasoning about processes, about events, and about or over time:
Reasoning at a point within a [business] process
Reasoning about events that occur over time.
Reasoning about a [business] process (as in deciding what [...]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Ontology
A panel on whether or not ontology is needed to achieve a collective vision for the semantic web was held on Tuesday at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009) near Washington, DC. For most of the panelists the question was rhetorical. But there were a few interesting points made, including that machine learning of [...]
Zigtag for social semantic tagging
I started to use Radar Networks’ Twine at the invitation of CEO Nova Spivak after writing this earlier this year (also see this). I enjoyed it for a while, especially because a lot of technology folks were hooking up with each other, especially the semantic web community, on Twine. But I found it tedious to [...]
A Common Upper Ontology for Advanced Placement tests
I have previously written about the lack of a common upper ontology in the semantic web and commercial software markets (e.g., business rules). For example, the lack of understanding of time limits the intelligence and ease of use of software in business process management (BPM) and complex event processing (CEP). The lack of understanding of [...]
Cyc is more than encyclopedic
I had the pleasure of visiting with some fine folks at Cycorp in Austin, Texas recently. Cycorp is interesting for many reasons, but chiefly because they have expended more effort developing a deeper model of common world knowledge than any other group on the planet. They are different from current semantic web startups. Unlike Metaweb’s [...]
Agile decision services without XML details
Externalizing enterprise decision management using service-oriented architecture orchestrated by business process management makes increases agility and allows continuous performance improvement, but…
How do you implement the rules of EDM in an SOA decision service?