Metaweb

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Metaweb Technologies, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	2005
Founder	Danny Hillis, Robert Cook
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, USA
Key people	Danny Hillis, CEO; Robert Cook, EVP for product development; John Giannandrea, CTO
Industry	Data management
Products	Freebase — an online database
Website	www.metaweb.com

For other uses, see Metaweb (disambiguation).

Metaweb Technologies, Inc. is a company based in San Francisco that is developing Metaweb, a semantic data storage infrastructure for the web, and Freebase, an "open, shared database of the worlds knowledge". The company was founded by Danny Hillis and others as a spinoff of Applied Minds in July, 2005, and operated in stealth mode until 2007.

1 Freebase
2 Funding
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Freebase

Freebase alpha logo

On March 3, 2007 Metaweb publicly announced Freebase, described by the company as "an open shared database of the worlds knowledge," and "a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data." It is currently accessible by invitation only and reported as being in the alpha stage of development. Much of the content of Freebase is user contributed, although it also contains data harvested or licensed by Metaweb from sources such as MusicBrainz and Wikipedia. ^[1] The contents of the database are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, and interfaces will be provided to programmers for developing applications that can utilize the data. With Freebase, according to founder Danny Hillis, Metaweb is "trying to create the world's database, with all of the world's information." In the future, the company hopes to generate business revenue by organizing proprietary data. ^[2]

Freebase's ontologies—structured data categories, known in Freebase as "types"—are themselves user-editable.^[1] Users can experiment with their own types, which can become broadly adopted if accepted by the administrator of the information category or domain it applies to.

[edit] Funding

On March 14, 2006, Metaweb received $15 million in funding. Investors included: Benchmark Capital, Millennium Technology Ventures, and Omidyar Network. Kevin Harvey of Benchmark Capital is a member of Metaweb's board of directors. ^[3]