i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

One interesting service that provides an ontology for common things is Freebase (which is now part of Google). You can look for a concept/person/place and Freebase will tell you different domains in which the concept is used. For example, if you look for Berkeley, you can refine your search for Berkeley (USA), Berkeley (UK), or Berkeley (University). You can go crazy and see that all the information that Freebase has about Berkeley is available as an RDF file. Then you can infer relationships between teachers, schools, programs, etc.

Of course, Freebase is a really cool source when you want to use an ontology to solve problems like homonymy or to improve information retrieval by adding context to your searches. That's exactly what MIMS 2010 graduates Nathan Gandomi and Michael Manoochehri did in IOLab last year. They created a tool (aliasFree) that allows you to use Freebase information to inform your search. For example, you can learn that "University of California, Berkeley" is sometimes referred as "Cal" or "UC Berkeley" and use these terms to improve your search. Or, you can narrow down your search by looking only at pages that have to do with UC Berkeley as a publisher or as an architectural structure owner (as opposed to as a school). You can try out things like "Lion" or "Michael Jordan" and find interesting stuff.

Well, enjoy your aliasFree search and happy Freebase hacking!