Three years ago Danny Hillis wrote “Aristotle” (The Knowledge Web) as an essay that appeared on The Edge. The Edge has just added an addendum to his original essay. While it doesn’t add much real information, it does describe the thinking that apparently led to Freebase and frames the original essay in the today’s context.

The Edge features interesting and often provocative articles along with commentary from their stable of “third culture intellectuals”. Reacting to HIllis’ essay are Douglas Rushkoff, Marc D. Hauser, Stewart Brand, Jim O’Donnell, Jaron Lanier, Bruce Sterling, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Howard Gardner, Seymour Papert, Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Kai Krause and Pamela McCorduck. What is surprising about the original 2004 essay is that is has no mention of the Semantic Web, RDF, OWL, DAML or the W3C. The only mention of any of these is in a comment from Jaron Lanier.

“There’s also a Knowledge Web that’s associated with the Semantic Web research community, which is led by Tim Berners-Lee.”

NOTE: Unfortunately the URL put up by the good people at the Edge is wrong, so, at the time of this writing, you will have to read ARISTOTLE” (THE KNOWLEDGE WEB) from Google’s cached copy.

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