Hillis Conceives Building a Machine-Readable Database to Present Information "Filtered, Selected and Presented According to the Needs of the Individual User"

In 2000 American inventor, scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, and author William Daniel "Danny" Hillis wrote a paper entitled Aristotle (The Knowledge Web). In 2007, at the time of founding Metaweb Technologies to develop aspects of ideas expressed in his Aristotle paper, Hillis wrote:

"In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

"One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database, while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the specific needs of the viewer. ["In his book Diamond Age, the science fiction writer Neil Stephenson describes an automatic tutor called The Primer that grows up with a child. Stephenson's Primer does everything described above and more. It becomes a friend and playmate to the heroine of the novel, and guides not only her intellectual but also her emotional development" (from Hillis's Aristotle, 2000). 

"John, Robert and I started a project,  then a company, to build that computer-readable database. How successful we will be is yet to be determined, but we are really trying to build it:  a universal database for representing any knowledge that anyone is willing to share. We call the company Metaweb, and the free database, Freebase.com. Of course it has none of the artificial intelligence described in the essay, but it is a database in which each topic is connected to other topics by links that describe their relationship. It is built so that computers can navigate and present it to humans. Still very primitive, a far cry from Neal Stephenson's magical storybook, it is a step, I hope, in the right direction" (http://edge.org/conversation/addendum-to-aristotle-the-knowledge-web, accessed 02-02-2014).