ISD Lecture Series: Robert Cook October 30, 2007

The Information and Service Design (ISD) Lecture Series brings together practitioners and researchers from various disciplines to report on their activities in the fields of information modeling, information delivery, service design, and the challenges of integrating these activities.

Lectures are held in room 202 from 5-6 pm.

Robert Cook ; Metaweb : Freebase: Building a Database of the World's Knowledge

Wikipedia has led the way with a collectively edited repository of human-readable information. Freebase seeks to do the same for machine-readable data, as a massive knowledge database compiled from many sources that is built by a user community and made freely available to the world via an open API. Freebase is based on a graph data store that contains several million entities spanning such diverse domains as people, places, business, entertainment, consumer products and science. The biggest challenge of such an audacious goal is achieving a critical mass of data through automated data extraction and by building a large community of contributors.
Robert Cook co-founded Metaweb Technologies in July 2005. At parent company Applied Minds, Robert led the San Francisco office as Director of Knowledge Product Development, specializing in large-scale computation and data visualization. Since the start of his career, Robert has played the role of an author, designer and programmer for myriad software applications. At the young age of 15, Robert created database software for a small publishing company, and at 18 published his first computer game through Broderbund Software. Robert holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Yale University.

Official Website: http://dret.net/lectures/isd-fall07/