True Knowledge - Blog

Public Beta Release

Today, we're excited to announce the next phase of our beta.

We have been testing a new look for our website along with a host of new features to make True Knowledge even more useful. This is a big release for us and we still have a lot to do. In this post today, we would like to give you an overview of what we've been up to and ask for your feedback to help us continue the improvements.

Question Answering for All

The most important change that is part of this redesign is that our question answering box is available to everyone now, without needing to sign in. Near the top of every page you'll find the question answer box along with example questions you can click through to.

Improved Answers

Images in Answers

We also improved our answers to make them more useful, including displaying semantically-appropriate images. For example, Who was UK prime minister when Hillary Clinton was a teenager? and Who are Joseph P. Kennedy's children? and even Can a can can can? produce detailed answers with images.

Long Answers

The other exciting change with our answers is longer-text answers. These multi-sentence responses build on our semantic technology and extend the answers we previously used to give. Some examples:

• Where is Mountain View? tells you about Mountain View itself and tells you what's the nearest big city.
• Where is Elvis? answers what seems to be a very common question. Sadly, the King passed away, and so we explain that and guide you to Graceland.
• A similar question is How old is Ronald Reagan?. This question has a false assumption at its heart (that President Reagan is still alive) and we deal with this neatly: we produce an answer that Reagan died in 2004 and give his age at the time of his death.
• How much sugar is in honey? gives you a clear and concise answer about the sugar content of honey.

Community Questions and Answers

Our community has always been a great source of facts that power our semantic Q&A technology, and now we're expanding their role significantly. In addition to being able to add semantic facts, we are asking our users to contribute questions and unstructured (non-semantic) answers.

Of course, users can still add semantic knowledge: the best starting point is the home page.

Give us your feedback!

This is a big release for us and are working hard to keep improving it. To do that, we would love your feedback and thoughts about what's working, what's not, and what's missing. You can:

• Use our support forums (you'll need to sign in using your True Knowledge account)
• Email me at community@trueknowledge.com
• Send us a tweet (we're @trueknowledge)
• Comment on our Facebook page.

DBPedia Data Live on True Knowledge

At True Knowledge we are passionate about linked data and making our API as accessible as possible. We know there is a huge community of people working with linked data and we want to make our service more accessible to them. We have recently imported links to a series of external services using data made available through the DBpedia project. You can find a list of relations linking to external databases by querying our query API as described below.

Image Credit: Chris Bizer DBpedia LOD Cloud. CC

Querying True Knowledge

The following examples use our query language. If you are unfamiliar with it, please see our developers' help page, this code examples blog post, and this one.

The query for listing all foreign relations True Knowledge knows about is:

query x
x [is an instance of] [foreign key relation]

This allows you to ask questions about objects within the same database, for example you could ask for the wikipedia pages of the countries Queen Elizabeth II is head of state for:

query x
[url: ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II_of_the_United_Kingdom"]] [is the wikipedia page for] y
y [is the head of state of] z
x [is the wikipedia page for] z


Or ask questions about objects between different databases, for example you could ask the Geonames URLs of the places the members of Girls Aloud are from given the DBpedia page:

query g
[url: ["http://dbpedia.org/resource/Girls_Aloud"]] [is the dbpedia uri for] x
[current time] [applies to] now/1
f: a [is a member of] x
f [applies at timepoint] now
p [is the origin of] a
g [is the geonames url for] p


You can use our api to map from one foreign key to another, or in this case all the others we know of:

query r, x
r [is an instance of] [foreign key relation]
[url: ["http://d.opencalais.com/er/company/ralg-tr1r/ce181d44-1915-3387-83da-0dc4ec01c6da"]] [is the open calais uri for] google
x r google


Or even the freebase ids of other husbands of women married to members of The Beatles:

query freebaseid
[url: ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles"]] [is the wikipedia page for] thebeatles
beatle [is a member of] thebeatles
beatle [is married to] wife
wife [is married to] newhusband
newhusband ~[is strictly equal to] beatle
freebaseid [is the freebase id for] newhusband


Having a go...

The best place to start with using our API to run the examples above is at our developers' help page. We also have examples on this blog post about our API PHP library, and this one. You can ask us questions by replying to the API sign-up email or at our API support forums.

Updated Firefox Addon, Including Firefox 3.6 Compatibility

Our Search Enhancer Firefox addon has been updated. Top new improvement is Firefox 3.6 compatibility, meaning you can continue to use our plugin when the latest new Firefox version is released (any time now).

We also tweaked it a bit, fixed a few minor bugs, and generally polished it to make it an even nicer addon to have.

If you have set your Firefox to automatically check for addon updates, it's likely you would have gotten the update already or will do soon. Otherwise, click on the Tools menu, select Addons, and in the new popup window, click the Extensions tab at the top. This will show you a list of your currently installed addons, and at the bottom is a button that says "Find Updates". Firefox will then find all updated addons, including the True Knowledge Search Enhancer.

one million unique visitors

Our web analytics reports have revealed that we hit a small milestone in the last couple of days: more than one million people used our websites in the previous calendar month for the first time.

This wasn't a one off or a particularly special month (with the holiday season quite the opposite in fact). We've been consistently doubling our traffic every month or so for a long time by publishing more and more answers to our users' questions using our technology. Users search for this content and find it valuable and we've continued to grow.

We also believe this is just the beginning. Our question answering capabilities are getting better all the time and in addition to work on our core platform we've been working hard on a new version of our main site which we hope to start testing with external users in the very near future. 

2010 is looking to be a very exciting year.

Knowledge Bit: True Knowledge Answers Inside Second Life

One of our API users and Second Life player, Taylor Dondich, contacted us yesterday about a very cool Second Life device he built called Knowledge Bit. When you enable it inside Second Life, it creates a device that hovers nearby. Interacting with it is via a chat window where you type in questions and it queries True Knowledge to get the answer.

Taylor made a nice short demo video of Knowledge Bit, embedded below, that shows you how it works and tells you how he made it. He uses the API proxy idea we described recently to communicate with the API and interface with Second Life.

Taylor's username in Second Life is Deflux Dollinger. And if you're interested in learning more about our API, please start at our API home page.