This process of
breaking apart a topic became a big part of
Freebase. It was clever.
You could make things as basic, or as detailed as you'd like.
Sometimes people went too-detailed, and the data became too complex to
query.
Other times things were too-simple, and had to be refactored later.
There was a lot of this sort of discussion, it was fun to do.
Two people would make schema at different levels of detail, and that
was fine.
(on wikipedia this is not fine)
We got to think about -
the different types of tornadoes
or whether
a horse and a race-car share useful properties
or whether
a book is an idea,
or ideas come from books
There was furious disagreement. It was a very fun thing to do. It
also felt important.
Tom Morris demonstrated his
changes appearing in a google search, just hours later. Facebook,
Bing, and everybody started using it. There were plenty of additional
rumours.
That winter, we bought my grandmother a new laptop.
she opened her browser, and typed in 'swine flu'
Bing displayed metadata from the infections disease ontology
that I wrote.
stupidly, i said 'i made that!'
and my grandma was like, good job sweetie.
Doug Lenat