Friday Google announced the acquisition of MetaWeb, the Semantic technology company that maintains FreeBase, a massive information storehouse based on “entity” linking. MetaWeb has been a leader providing Open Data/Open Access by providing full data dumps and strong API hooks.
This bodes well for making search results more relevant, rich, and refined, and signals the acceptance of Semantic style inking as the next wave of information aggregation. However, in an ominous move, Google decided to kill the WordPress Plugin that allowed Blog publishers to embed a Freebase link that brought the wealth of Semantic on a certain topic into their pages. Let’s hope that it doesn’t become yet another proliferation of Google Ads.
Museum Imaging 