Wikipedia's Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others

Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February's Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

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Comments

[jdoeremi]

08:13 PM on 03/30/2012

Whoa! What a remarkable idea! What database structure? I imagine some kind of hypercube with drill down to detail features. What about the backend? CloudSQL? MySQL? Oracle? I already see new professions and new research/predictive/network science emerge from this. Perhaps data miners and pattern recognition simply won't be enough because it's too generic and less specific. Where and how do I sign up?

[matthewmk2]

05:59 PM on 03/30/2012

So it's Freebase? But from Wiki? Why?

[TisKishnsing]

01:41 PM on 03/30/2012

Interesting...