The New York Times profiled Metaweb Technologies and its Freebase project last weekend. Metaweb spun out from a project at Applied Minds, Inc, and intends to produce a public, machine-readable database as an alternative to search engines.
The idea behind it harks back to that much - quoted 1945 article, As we may think, by Vannevar Bush. Amongst Bush's many observations was that there was an awful lot of information out there, but that keeping up with it - even in a specialised area - was nearly impossible.
The idea behind Freebase, according to the Times, is to hand over a lot of the onerous tasks of searching the Web as an individual to software agents. Instead of bringing back thousands of results, Freebase will bring back a handful - and they will be what you're looking for. The idea is based on co-founder Danny Hillis' Aristotle concept.
This may sound quite familiar, but the idea appears to be to take a lot of the things that are good about the semantic web and stick them in one ginormous database, cutting the amount of time stuck in front of a search engine refining searches. The database can then be searched by software agents and made freely accessible - it's licensed under the Creative Commons copyright license.
At present, Wikipedia, Chefmoz and Musicbrainz - all semantic web organisations - are contributing data, and Hillis suggests in the article that Encyclopedia Britannica may be contributing, too. It'll be a positive sign if EB does.
It's also worth taking a look at Danny Hillis' impressive track record, which includes The Long Now Foundation and the Thinking Machines Corporation, which built massively parallel computers with the involvement of Richard Feynman before going bust.
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