In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Semantic Web startup Metaweb’s Minister of Information, Jamie Taylor. Best known for Freebase which, although only in limited alpha release, has already attracted the admiration of such commentators as Tim O’Reilly, Jon Udell, and OpenBusiness, Metaweb has the goal of ‘build[ing] a better infrastructure for the Web.’ Freebase’s online help describes Metaweb’s vision thus;

“We aspire to be the center of a new Web by being a critical piece of infrastructure for businesses, organizations and people that want to use, present and manipulate information. We’ve started by building a working system and a single example application. Over the next few months, we will work to demonstrate our larger vision by integrating Metaweb into other applications, websites, blogs… anywhere there is a need for structured information. Right now only a few thousand websites are ‘database driven’. If we succeed, millions will be.

We will be compared to Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and other information driven sites, but such a comparison misses our real purpose: we are trying to enable thousands of organizations and millions of people to build their own Web. Paradoxically, we are decentralizing the experience of information by centralizing the storage of it.”

During our conversation, we discuss Freebase, Metaweb’s wider goals, and the way in which both fit within the wider notion of a Semantic - or Data - Web.

Listen Now | Download MP3 [65 mins, 45 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Creative Commons‘ Attribution License
• Freebase
• Garlik
• Living on the Fault Line by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Metaweb
• Open Data panel at WWW2007
• Radar Networks
• Semantic MediaWiki
• Semantic Technology conference
• Wikipedia

This conversation was conducted over Skype on Friday 25 May, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

Technorati Tags: Freebase, Linked Data, open data, Participation, Platforms, Podcasting, Jamie Taylor, RDF, Semantic Web, Talis, Talking with Talis, Web 3.0, WWW2007

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