I've asked myself for a long time why Evernote even has users and eventually landed on the conclusion that Evernote is almost like a file system. You can easily create notes, which can contain more or less everything, which is more easy than creating various sorts of files in folders to store your stuff. The "more or less everything" part, is why the whole thing is such a big mess, imho.
What I'd like is an Evernote with less possibilities and perhaps sections in each note. E.g.:
- plain text (or up to Google docs kind of formatting)
- a photo section where I can dump some pics without them showing on ridiculous full screen resolution.
- a URL (which maybe shows a small screenshot of the webpage, or even loads a copy of the text)
To me it's about about storing/remembering stuff I care about in a simple and portable way.
1. Our read/write API allows you to get any existing data set into Silk. We have various importers available. No OWL/RDF at this time, but that may very well be developed by ourselves or our developer eco-system in the future.
2. Silk has a powerful query engine that allows quite complex reasoning. Part of that is already exposed in the product, through our search bar and the so called "explore mode". We have no UI yet for the more complex queries, but those can be performed through our API.
1. Freebase aims to build one big repository of structured data for all the information in the world, whereas Silk consists of separate sites with separate owners.
2. Datasets in Silk are also common websites. Technically, there is no need to use the semantic layar of Silk. Admittedly, it's a lot less fun without :)
The http://world.silkapp.com site was actually built that way. It's a combination of information on Wikipedia & the CIA world factbook. We built a MediaWiki importer for this, that will be publicly available at some point. Also, some of the functionality may make it to the core product, but we'll have to see how this develops over time.
Silk does use pattern recognition to automatically infer data types already, so you won't have to specify that something is a location, date, currency, number, etc. The editor will find out itself. We are working hard to bring this kind of 'cleverness' to more and more aspects of the editor.
As for incompatible schemas, we're not aiming to build one big ontology for the world, but we are aiming to facilitate a large number of datasets that are useful by themselves. We're working towards being able to link various Silk sites to each other and will try to find ways to make as many as schemas fit into each other.
When people have existing data with some structure, they can easily convert this into a semantic Silk site. This can be done using various importer tools (such as our CSV importer) and via the read/write API.
When people are creating new content, we're trying to make it as easy as possible to add semantics/tags. It's as easy as making your text bold and we try to provide instant value to users who tag their content, thereby encouraging them to keep doing so. Some things we do are:
- converting currencies
- showing how long ago a date was
- displaying a map for locations
- showing how data relates to other data (tagging the age of a person, will show a list of how old other people in the site are)
So, if you have unstructured data and are looking for one quick answer, Silk may not be the right tool to use. When the data has some structure already, you can easily convert it into a Silk site and then enjoy some Silk magic. But ideally, you use Silk to make some specific content available in a structured manner, so you can use it for a longer period of time.