[Posted with admin permission; thanks, Phoebe.]
Freebase is a free database of the world's knowledge. It draws its information from a variety of sources, of which Wikipedia is one of the most important.
Next Tuesday we'll be having a user group meeting here in SF and one of our presenters will be talking about how we mine Wikipedia for data and extract semantic meaning from articles. There was a previous talk on a related topic ("Mining Wikipedia") which I've posted at http://blog.freebase.com/2008/06/10/brian-karlak-on-mining-wikipedia/ and which might also be of interest.
Powerset (http://powerset.com/) , the semantic search engine which searches Wikipedia and Freebase, will also be sending one of their techs to talk about how they do what they do.
You can see the full list of speakers and presentation topics at http://blog.freebase.com/2008/06/12/speakers-at-next-tuesdays-freebase-user-...
If you'd like to attend, please RSVP at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/760574/ so we know how much beer and pizza to provide.
Thanks!
K.
wikimedia-sf@lists.wikimedia.org