True Knowledge - Blog

New Community Manager

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to introduce myself; I’m the new community manager here at True Knowledge. I’ll be responsible for running the forum (and all the other community aspects of true knowledge) and making sure you guys, the users, are taken care of and have a voice inside the company.

A little about me: I’m passionate about technology and what True Knowledge is doing. I’ve been working at True Knowledge as a Knowledge Engineer since February this year (under the username nfranklin) so am very familiar with the technology and the company as a whole. I also built and manage a social networking site of my own (amateurillustrator.com) which is focused around art (another of my passions).

As community manager I will be taking care of True Knowledge’s users: so all feedback, feature requests, complaints, etc, will be managed by me. I will be far from the only True Knowledge voice. You can expect my colleagues like William (the founder) and Beth (one of our Knowledge Engineers) and others will continue to blog. And of course you'll still find many of our team active in the forum.

Please feel free to contact me any time by email (community@trueknowledge.com) or private message.

All the best,

Nick

Employee bio: Tim Martin

by Nick Franklin
This is the second in a series of employee profiles we're doing to give the outside world an idea of what life is like working at True Knowledge.

Tim Martin was employee number two at True Knowledge.  He has a degree in maths from the University of Cambridge and has been working at True Knowledge as a software developer since 2005.  Tim enjoys cross country running, eating curry and watching Top Gear.

What’s a typical day like for you?
Work starts at 8:30 with coffee and (on a good day) doughnuts. I check the overnight tests for failures, triage any new issues that have been raised, and then get stuck into making the world a better place. Development work tends to split between focussed individual coding and wide-ranging discussions with the rest of the team on how to build a better product. I’m also responsible for architecture, which involves taking half-baked ideas for improvements from other people and turning them into well-defined specifications.

What excites you most about True Knowledge?
The product has great potential and does something that nobody else can do.

What's it like working in the development team at True Knowledge?
There’s quite an informal mood among the developers, but everyone works very hard. There’s no shortage of really hard problems to get stuck into, which is exactly what developers like.

What piece of work are you most proud of at True Knowledge?
Any time I get a speed improvement, no matter how small. There’s something terribly satisfying in making code do everything it used to do, but faster.

What do you like doing when you’re not redefining internet search?
I like to go running; I’m training for a half-marathon in a couple of weeks.

What was it like appearing on BBC News 24 last week?
In a word, unexpected. I had no idea they would be arriving, and when I first saw strangers in the office I assumed they were interview candidates. Before I knew what was happening they’d clipped a microphone to me and started asking me questions. But I enjoy talking about True Knowledge, and it wasn’t that different from talking to anyone else as it turned out.

Name your top 3 questions you can ask True Knowledge.

• Show me the states of the US on the 3rd of July 1832
• Are Jennifer Lopez and Hillary Clinton married?
• When did Rome burn?

Name your top 3 most exciting moments since you started working at True Knowledge (in or outside work).

• Closing our first funding round
• Opening the beta process to the first members of the public
• Completing the British 10k run in London last year

Give me three questions that you'd like to see True Knowledge to answer in the future.

• What is my girlfriend’s favourite colour and dress size?
• List books about software architecture
• Which curry house is nearest to my house?

Enjoying your first visit

by Nick Franklin

This is the first in a series of posts we’ll be doing to help you get started with the True Knowledge beta site.

If you haven’t done so already I suggest signing up for an account, this will give you access to our main beta site where you can try out the True Knowledge Answer Engine.

Once you’ve activated your account and logged in you’ll be confronted with a page that looks a lot like a generic search engine’s homepage. However, the difference with True Knowledge is that you can get direct answers to direct questions.

There is no better way to get started using [true knowledge] than to try out some of our example questions. This will give you a feel for the type of things you can ask, e.g.

• What was the age of Queen Victoria on the 2nd of June 1859?
• How far is New York City from Paris in kilometres?
• Is Barack Obama older than Hillary Clinton?
• Who was president of the US when Barack Obama was a teenager?
• How long was Tony Blair the prime minister of the UK?
• How long is it until Christmas?
• What time is it at Google headquarters?
• (click here for more)

You may want to try altering some of these questions. For example you could change “What time is it at Google headquarters?” to “What time is it at the Statue of Liberty?”, or “is Barack Obama older than Hillary Clinton?” to “is John McCain older than Sean Connery?”.

Feel free to ask [true knowledge] anything you like; although the system can’t currently answer every question put to it, it does have the capacity, given the right knowledge, to answer almost anything.

In the next post in this series we’ll start on the basics of knowledge addition. Knowledge addition is a feature of the site that lets users teach [true knowledge] to answer new questions.

When is a Chinese supermarket not Chinese?

Have you ever wondered what 'Australian' really means?

That's exactly what we've been doing here at True Knowledge.  We're creating new objects based on Wikipedia pages and we want to add as many facts about the new objects as possible.  The Wikipedians have kindly put everything into categories such as 'Australian bands', 'African cuisine' etc, and we've been figuring out the best way to handle this perceived nationality.

Let's start with mountains.  Defining an Australian mountain is easy - if the mountain is located within Australia, then it's an Australian mountain.  But of course we can't generalise that to other classes.  If I go on holiday to Australia then I'm physically located there, but it doesn't make me an Australian, because I wasn't born there and I don't have Australian nationality or ancestry.  So that gives us a few ways to define Australianess in different contexts - location, birth, blood and nationality.

What about businesses?  If a business has it's headquarters in Sydney then it's obviously Australian, but so is one that operates only there but is based offshore in the Cayman Islands.  A Polish man operating a single-person plumbing business in England is obviously a Polish plumber, so maybe we should say that his company is both a Polish plumbing business and an English one.  A 'Chinese supermarket' is one that sells ingredients for Chinese recipes, so if some brothers were born in Brazil, grew up in France, then took over a Chinese supermarket in California, then do we describe the business as Californian, Chinese, French, Brazilian or some combination of the above?

This was all getting a bit complicated, and we didn't want the user to be faced with too many choices to disambiguate between if they asked a question, so we decided to do it like this:

We use a very general attribute "Australian, is pertaining to the Commonwealth of Australia" which can be inferred in a number of ways. This allows us give you a simple answer and show exactly what we meant by "Yes" in an explanation underneath.  We'll be releasing this feature later this week after a bit more testing.

Recently I said that that we'd be getting the question "Who is the president of the smallest republic in the world?" working.  This new feature will allow to confirm that he is definitely a Nauruan!

Employee bio: Jon Coe

by Nick Franklin
This is the first in a series of employee profiles we'll be doing to give the outside world an idea of what life is like working at True Knowledge.

Jon Coe was employee number one at True Knowledge.  He has a PhD in mediaeval Welsh place-names from the University of Wales and a masters in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic from the University of Cambridge.  He has been working at True Knowledge since 2005, first as a software developer and then as the company's Knowledge Team Manager.  He has a young family, likes going on Bushcraft courses and worships Ray Mears.

What’s a typical day like for you?
I don't know that there is such a thing as a typical day! I spend quite a bit of my time in discussions with other members of the company. Checking over tests, generating stats, and planning future projects. Thinking about how to represent tricky things within our ontology, cake for example.

What excites you most about True Knowledge as a technology and as a business?
Helping to create a technology that really can answer people's questions -- not just search Web pages.

Describe your experience watching True Knowledge grow from just you and William to the size it is now.
Looking back, it's exciting, but at the time each development just seemed like a natural progression. There was a lot of nervousness over funding and whether people would 'get it' initially.

What piece of work are you most proud of at True Knowledge?
Three pieces of work really, at different stages of the company's development: the creation of the first interface; importing all the world's settlements; building the Knowledge Team!

What's it like managing a team at True Knowledge?
Fun! Hard work at times, too, but we work well as a team.

When did you decide you wanted to work in the high-tech sector?
After I left academia I worked for a small company where I accidentally fell into the role of resident IT expert. I learnt a lot in that time but eventually decided that the only way to advance further was to work for an IT company. I met an acquaintance of William's while playing football one evening and the rest is history!

Name your top 3 questions you can ask True Knowledge.

• Who has been prime minister of the UK since Jon Coe was born?
• When was John McCain a teenager?
• Is the population of Wales larger than the population of Mongolia?

Name your top 3 most exciting moments since you started working at True Knowledge (in or outside work).

• The birth of my son.
• Getting married.
• The announcement of our seed funding.

Give me three questions that you'd like True Knowledge to answer in the future.

• When will sunset in Cambridge next occur before 6 pm?
• list the five cheapest Indian restaurants in Cambridge by average price of a main course
• Is Bromsgrove further north than Cambridge?