I thought Freebase [1] was the most promising "Semantic Web" technology, with a powerful query language (MQL) and an application platform called Acre [2]. I'm biased because I worked at Danny Hillis' adjacent company, Applied Minds, and met with the Freebase folks to talk about graph databases. I went to one of Freebase's Hack Days, and I could feel the energy around building applications on a semantically-aware global database.
Unfortunately, they got acquired by Google, and Freebase eventually shut down. Thinking back now, I wonder if there would have been a business model in hosting private data graphs to subsidize the open source data.
Danny has been collaborating with some people in the MIT Media Lab and Protocol Labs to get a non-profit, open-source, and distributed version of Freebase off the ground, called the Underlay. I know they're looking for passionate people to work with, so if you're interested you should reach out! https://underlay.mit.edu/
That really sucks. Being bought out by Google probably creates some implicit benefits to their search experience (likely with their topical breadcrumbs which returns widgets inside the search window giving a list of objects that match and near-match, like books by an author).
But the acquisition prevents there from existing a service that can inspire a wider ecosystem on something like a federated platform.
You probably would like to have a look at Wikidata that is very similar to Freebase and is gaining a huge community of contributors and data reusers: https://wwww.wikidata.org/
Its great to see he's continuing this work! Makes sense to use existing technology like IPFS to distribute the graph, instead of building the technology from the ground up like we were trying to do back in the day.
Seems pretty clear to me that freebase was a thread to Google search. A semantic knowledge search with a powerful query language could replace a good chunk of free text google searches at least for power users.
Makes sense for them to buy it and get rid of it that way.
You can still download the data at https://developers.google.com/freebase/. Looks like the data is available there and the license is "Creative Commons Attribution (aka CC-BY)". Wonder why someone hasn't created a new company starting with their dataset? It's "only" 2gb compressed, 8gb uncomp, 63 million entries. That is smaller than I expected.
Unfortunately, they got acquired by Google, and Freebase eventually shut down. Thinking back now, I wonder if there would have been a business model in hosting private data graphs to subsidize the open source data.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase [2] - https://opensource.googleblog.com/2010/08/acre-open-source-p...