I hope graph databases intrigues me sometime in the near future . I have been playing around with freebase api for sometime and i must admit that freebase does a fairly decent job in recognizing some of the entities that they promise to identify . Location is one such entity . They use a mix of NLP and a DB of locations to identify location entity . They ofcourse have a semantic relationship (city -> country -> continent for eg) between these entities that can offer u more insight . However , things like "context" of a free flowing text need to mature . They provide something called as the Social Tag for any text that u paste but sometimes it is too generic and sometimes it is far from the right context and many a times there is no social tags . So we had to kind of move away from relying on Freebase and figure our own ways . I agree to Joe's comments that extracting semantic info has to get more smarter , and relying on webmasters to provide this data is certainly not going to be scalable and achievable in the near future . google's acquisition of freebase did come as a surprise to me (considering the current capability of FB) , but their promise of providing a weekly dump meant there was a good news (not for long as we did not continue relying on FB anyways)
Looking at Watson could do , made me wonder why is the technology world so lagging behind w.r.t interpreting information .If NLP is a solved problem (looks like in Watson's case) are we only pending creating a linkage between the real world entities???. Freebase has linked 20 million but thats not enough . The approach is non profit , "good for the world" kinds . Can there be an incentive for people to provide links between entities . Can we bring up a profit model where people/organizations compete to provide more and better linkages . Or can we extract such links from peoples web activity (search , social networking etc [FB,Twitter]) .. i am getting too many ideas now :D:D ... and ofcourse can we request IBM to donate their NLP technology for the greater good :P :P