I think that there are two things in their favor here:
First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it.
Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications.
I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.
Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed the book. I wanted to point out that Colin Evans and Jamie Taylor were also authors (and still work on the Knowledge Team at Google) and should get some credit.
Haha! Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't mean to leave them off. I met you guys in 2009 at a semantic tech conference, back before Metaweb was purchased. So glad to see your work being pushed to the most popular website in the world.
I think that generalization is false as often as it is true.
But also, have you read any of the papers involved? Datalog is pretty simple. It's a restricted, forward chaining prolog. Once you know that, you can recreate most of it from that description alone.
First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it.
Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications.
I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.