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I think that there are two things in their favor here: First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their
by JPKab 14y ago
I think that there are two things in their favor here:
First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it.
Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications.
I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y agoThere's little need. It's a direct application of concepts that are well treated academically in all the various datalog papers.
- daoudc 14y agoTaking academic research to production ready code is far from trivial.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y agoI think that generalization is false as often as it is true. But also, have you read any of the papers involved? Datalog is pretty simple. It's a restricted, forward chaining prolog. Once you know that, you can recreate most of it from that description alone.
- toby 14y agoThanks so much! Glad you enjoyed the book. I wanted to point out that Colin Evans and Jamie Taylor were also authors (and still work on the Knowledge Team at Google) and should get some credit.
- JPKab 14y agoHaha! Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't mean to leave them off. I met you guys in 2009 at a semantic tech conference, back before Metaweb was purchased. So glad to see your work being pushed to the most popular website in the world.