Hidden behind some billion-dollar database-company acquisitions - on what must be a record-breaking day for number of deals in the sector - came a little funding news that could eventually have equal significance for the way we organise our information online.

While Sun was paying $1bn for MySQL, Oracle was buying BEA Systems for $8.5bn and SAP was wrapping up its $7.15bn Business Objects acquisition, San Francisco-based Metaweb received $42.5m in second-round funding led by Goldman Sachs.

Metaweb says its aim is to build a better infrastructure for the web. Its first product is Freebase – “an open, shared database of the world’s information.”

Web sites have been able to provide more relevant and meaningful results for users’ searches in recent years, thanks to XML, which allows more detailed tagging and categorising of information.

Wikipedia is an example of information being organised by users themselves in an even more structured way and Freebase is extending this by drawing on Wikipedia and many other sources for its open database.

It differs from Wikipedia in listing facts and statistics rather than articles on subjects. This rawer format allows others to sort and repurpose the information into new forms on their own web sites. Freebase is also different from Google Base in eliminating any duplication of data and providing a community editing tool.

It is still early days, but Metaweb hopes to make money by serving ads next to the information that Freebase throws up - a model where Google has been rather successful and where Metaweb could become a threat – as well as by charging for some commercial uses of its APIs.

January 16th, 2008 in Internet, Software, Tech Finance | Permalink