One question:
Which all movies did both George Clooney and Brad Pitt act in?
Am sure you would be going to google. And what do you do after that? See all the links, and check each and every page, trying to find the common movies.
Now why could the computer not do this? Why are you spending 5 minutes trying to find this out, when you should be able to request the computer to do this..... Enter Semantic search, a mechanism where you can query data for relationships which the human mind understands, and secondly the computer understands.
There are many places where they are trying to build this semantic search. I build a small application which uses freebase. And built an application where you can provide the names of 2 actors/actresses and find the movies both worked on. Check the page http://www.nlighten.in/CommonMovies.html .
Details about freebase: Freebase uses the databases provided by Wikipedia and multiple other providers, and provide all the data in OOP concepts. So you would be able to run queries (JSON queries, something similar to SQL queries), to get answers to your questions.
Please feel free to test out the app.
Points to note:
1. Semantic search does not replace google. But only helps you to find answers to questions which google may not understand.
2. I am currently querying only actors, but you if you want could query other types, such as politicians, indians, etc.etc.
Keep Searching,
Sachin
Comments
I'm sure you've thought of this, but including links to the films on Freebase would be neat.
Ever cooler would be to add Freebase Suggest with the type set to /film/actor This would make it much easier for the user to choose the actors.