Diffbot: Web + WebKit + AI => global knowledge database ==

Another Stanford-related startup that could "change the world"...
"Semantic Web" vision may be realized after all, just in very different way, built by AI :)

very interesting podcast interview:
Using AI to build a comprehensive database of knowledge - O'Reilly Media

"Diffbot - a company dedicated to building large-scale knowledge databases. Diffbot is at the heart of many web applications, and it’s starting to power a wide array of intelligent applications.

… Roughly, what happens when our robot first encounters a page is we render the page in our own customized rendering engine, which is a fork of WebKit that's basically had its face ripped off. It doesn't have all the human niceties of a web browser, and it runs much faster than a browser because it doesn't need those human-facing components. … The other difference is we've instrumented the whole rendering process. We have access to all of the pixels on the page for each XY position. … [We identify many] features that feed into our semi-supervised learning system. Then millions of lines of code later, out comes knowledge."

More interesting interviews from this space

Data - O'Reilly Media 

Topics - O'Reilly Media (new web site)

Startup Unleashes Its Clone of Google’s ‘Knowledge Graph’ | WIRED


Diffbot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diffbot announced it was working on its version of an automated "Knowledge Graph" by crawling the web and using its automatic web page extraction to build a large database of structured web data.