Just a few corrections to the historical dates given by Tom.
2013/8/23 Tom Morris tfmorris@gmail.com
In a word, no. Google acquired Metaweb, the company that built Freebase, which forms the core of the Knowledge Graph in 2010. Metaweb was founded in 2005 (interesting Google search: "Metaweb founding") and started extracting information from Wikipedia into Freebase in 2006. https://www.freebase.com/m/0gw0?links&lang=en&historical=true
The first DBpedia release was in 2007. Semantic information nets go back to the 60s. TBL coined the term "semantic web" in 2006.
TBL coined the term "semantic web" at latest in 1994, probably even before (I don't have Weaving the Web at hand, but here are TBL's slides from the WWW conference in 1994: http://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/)
WikiData is a great project, but this progress has been building, excrutiatingly slowly, over decades. One could even make the argument that WikiData is the result of Knowledge Graph and its antecedents rather than the other way around.
Wikidata is influenced by RDF (1999), OWL (2004), Semantic MediaWiki (2005), Freebase (2006), DBpedia (2007), Semantic Forms (2007), and many many other technologies that are less visible or don't have such a strong brand (and Michael is very aware of that history, he's been around years before working on the technologies these are based on).
I understand Michael's question to be much more concrete: does the progress in Wikidata has anything to do with the changes in the Knowledge Graph's visibility in Google's searches that happened last month?
Cheers, Denny
Tom
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