ReadWriteWeb

Sometimes highly accomplished people just have to join crazy little startups. It's always exciting to see what happens when they do. Data scientist Kurt Bollacker is one of those people; he's decided to join Austin-based bulk data marketplace startup Infochimps, one of the most interesting little companies we regularly write about here.

Bollacker's history is intense. He helped build one of the first search engines online for academic research papers, the first prototype for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine where he was the Technical Director, he was a biomedical research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center, did research on long term digital archiving as the Digital Research Director at the Long Now Foundation and was the Chief Scientist at Metaweb, the massively ambitious semantic web project that Google acquired in the Summer of 2010. Those are some of the weightiest data projects in the Internet's young history; now he's joined InfoChimps. "The project that is Infochimps is in it for the long haul," Bollacker told ReadWriteWeb. "We're going to make something of lasting value. That's something I can buy into."

When Google acquired Metaweb last summer it got Freebase Gridwork, a tool for cleaning up messy datasets, as part of the deal. Today Google released a new version of the tool, now called Google Refine. Like its predecessor, Google Refine is open source.

The Semantic Web is all about structuring data so that humans and computers can more easily interpret the Web and discover relevant data for a wide variety of purposes. Google, a company built on the ability to advertise based on contextual data, announced today a major acquisition in the Semantic Web space. As of today, Metaweb, maker of Freebase and a leader in the Semantic Web, has joined forces with Google.

Wikipedia is an incredible monument to human creativity and collaboration, but as one era of innovation passes into another - semantic web advocates want to augment the huge human input into the web with machine learning. The semantically enriched common database Freebase announced today that it will soon reach the milestone of 4 million topics added to its collection. That's 60% more than English Wikipedia's 2,445,041 articles and almost half the size of Wikipedia's full 10 million articles in 250 different languages.

What is Freebase? It's a database of information that's organized by people and machines and is particularly well suited for machine reading. You're not a machine - so why should you care? Read on.