What if the biggest web company bought one of the central semantic web players?

Well, exactly this happened yesterday: Google bought Metaweb – provider of Freebase. Freebase is an important hub in the linked data cloud providing 12 million entities with uniform resource identifiers most of them linked to other semantic web datasets like DBpedia or New York Times. For example: Google´s page on Freebase offers a rich source for machine-readable facts around this company.

What does this mean to the Semantic Web Community which has  been working on a smarter web in the last decade?
Well, a lot… First of all, it´s good to hear that Google will continue to develop Freebase as a free and open database to everyone, saying “… we would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data.”

Until yesterday still a lot of companies were not fully convinced if the Semantic Web will play a central role in the further development of the Internet. Now the game has changed. The entity-driven approach to develop web applications has just started now:

We will keep on reporting and discussing how Google will influence the development of the Semantic Web – and if I had a wish for free: Please add RDF(a) to the Freebase widgets!

Semantic Web