Comments on: It’s about relationships!

By: miholc

miholc — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:00:03 +0000

John, there are lots of docs at the Freebase site but a good place to start might be this brief technical overview of the backend datastore.

By: John Lewis

John Lewis — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:59:57 +0000

Hello Michael, it is good to hear from you!

Thanks for identifying that implementation of relationships. I’d be interested to hear more about how flexible the Freebase construct is.

At present, in most systems, fundamental relationships are available in a very limited number of fixed types, as was the case for variable types in old fashioned programming languages. Fabrications of more sophisticated relationships usually end up with the implementation fragmented among the classes involved in the relationship. Surely we can do better!

It will be interesting to see how comprehensively it is feasible for relationships to represented.

John W Lewis

By: miholc

miholc — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:31:03 +0000

John – Michael Callaghan here (old QA contact). Perhaps there’s no better example of the emergence of relationships as “first class objects” of central importance than the community database Freebase, where the basic unit of data is the triple: subject-relation-object (I’m currently working on a “semantic web” app to be hosted there …)

By: John Lewis

John Lewis — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:19:10 +0000

Good points, Rob.

Very few people have yet understood the trends in relationships which transcend traditional corporate and individual boundaries.

However, in the past, such significant shifts have proved insurmountable by organisations founded on earlier paradigms. In my view: forget IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc, and look to Google, LinkedIn, Facebook/FriendFeed, Twitter and other “connection/relationship oriented” outfits … maybe even Nokia, once they get over their shock and unfounded fear of Apple!

Yes knowledge management, in general, and data/knowledge mining/harvesting, in particular, are all available once appropriate relationships are established.

Encouragement, rewards …? Why, isn’t it all good old innovation?!

John W Lewis

By: robbieatk

robbieatk — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:05:52 +0000

Yup, there’s money to be made for those who understand the trends of social computing/networks both inside and outside the corporate firewall. No one really get’s it yet in the org, apart from maybe IBM. Microsoft is catching up fast.. wait until you see what’s coming with Office 2010

Data mining for want of a better word, knowledge harvesting.. is the thing to get involved with. The question remains, how do you encourage people to share what they know..? What sort of rewards based system could you implement to get them to participate?

Rob Atkinson