Paul O’Rorke

At the SF Freebase Meetup on January 13th, 2010, Jamie Taylor briefly described WordNet, the lexical database of words developed by George Miller and colleagues at Princeton. Jamie recently put WordNet 3.0 into Freebase, an open symantic database created by Metaweb Technologies. The aim of the Freebase project is to enlist a global community and to include much of the world’s knowledge in a relatively coherent and well-structured form in a huge database that everyone can access. The inclusion of WordNet is a powerful addition to the substantial body of information already in Freebase.

Jeremy Kahn gave a lively and humorous presentation at the meetup on words and on differences and similarities between words and GPS locations. Jeremy is from a new startup called Wordnik that is fielding a sort of next-generation dictionary online.

Jamie and Jeremy both mentioned the similarities between concepts associated with words or WordNet “synsets” (sets of synonyms) and Freebase’s topics and types. Jamie listed several related projects on his agenda including adding WordNet 2 and working out its relationship to version 3 and adding related information from Stanford’s augmented WordNet.

Efforts along these lines — putting large chunks of knowledge into an easily accessible form — will accelerate the development of more and more innovative and intelligent software applications.