Freebase launches

Posted by Angela Beesley on March 11, 2007 (Wiki, Wikimedia, Wikipedia)

Wikimedia Advisory Board member Danny Hillis launched Freebase this week, a startup that TechCrunch says is aiming to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.

Like Wikipedia, Freebase will allow participants to add to and edit at least some of the content. Content is also brought in from other sites, including Wikipedia. User contributed content will be freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Tim O’Reilly, coiner of the term “web 2.0“, calls Freebase “the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.”

Freebase is a project of Metaweb which used to host Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver Wiki (see archive.org for April’s version). Wikipedia noted the wiki’s disappearance in January.

See Wikipedia’s article on Freebase for more information. See also Wikimedia’s meta page on the related Semantic MediaWiki.