David Orban

Freebase merges the bottom up approach of the social web, with the hierarchies of directories, and the orderliness of traditional relational databases to help “organize the world’s knowledge”. (If that sounds familiar, it is because that is what Google is blindly about, with algorithms that are striving to see with barely formed eyes under heavy evolutionary pressure.)
 
Ok. It is a long shot. Just a bunch of database fields filled by volunteers might not amount to much. But I cannot help myself, and as I read about Metaweb’s Freebase on O’Reilly Radar and in the New York Times, my mind goes to common sense knowledge base projects like the bottom up Open Mind, and Mindpixel, and of course the hugely ambitious, and hugely unsuccessful Cyc. Will they succeed where others haven’t? I certainly hope so. A lot of us waste our energies pampering computers, and trying to help them achieve better what we easily can. Once that is taken care of, we can go back to our gossips, love-stories, politics, and conquest. As we have been doing for a few millennia.

David Orban was the author of this article and is CEO of Questar, a virtual subsidiary organization representing technology companies reaching for success in the EU. He is also an analyst of the global high technology landscape, with broad experience in structuring virtual subsidiary deals for companies penetrating the EU, and EMEA markets. He has a deep understanding of the needs and mechanics of both product marketing, sales development, localization, and globalization.
 
David authored Upgrading Humans, Why Not? – Kevin Warwick speaks at Uvvy Island, Sony’s PlayStation Home validates, and pushes Second Life model, Interactive Enigma machine simulator, Participatory Democracy, Fifty Years of Europe, New space launch company Blue Origin unveiled, Google AI achieves medical Expert System status, Daniel Dennett in Venice ruffles some priestly feathers, Italy’s attempt to censor over 500 websites, and The Amazon Mechanical Turk that represents a potential revolution.
 
He studied physics at the University of Padua from 1984 to 1987 and studied physics at the University of Milan from 1987 to 1990. Watch TEDx Brussels 2010 – David Orban – Every Thing. Read his blog!