True Knowledge - Blog

Over 100,000 user added facts have gone in!

Sometime in the last week True Knowledge silently passed this milestone:

Over 100,000 facts have now been added by beta testers through the add knowledge interface.

We are extremely grateful to all our beta-testers who have helped True Knowledge reach this point.

On a related note we are working hard to improve the knowledge addition interfaces so that it is easier and faster for users to input the information they want.

Many thanks,

Nick Franklin (Community Manager)

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True Knowledge Meet Summary

 I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended the first True Knowledge social on Saturday for helping make the evening a success.

I know that everyone there from True Knowledge had a really good time (including me) and were also pleased that staff were outnumbered by beta-testers.

There was a good buzz in the room and no shortage of interesting conversation.  I picked up some good tips and learnt a lot about what users like about True Knowledge and what they think needs improving.  Our knowledge addition UI was something a few beta testers raised as a concern but the overall vibe was one of excitement for our growing company.

Our next Cambridge social will likely be an office warming party for after we've moved into our new premises.

I've uploaded a few photos (sorry about the poor quality) to the facebook event page here.

Many thanks,

Nick Franklin
Community Manager - True Knowledge
 
p.s.
Please follow us on Twitter.

True Knowledge Social in 3 days

Only 3 days to go until the first True Knowledge meet-up and it is looking to be a fun afternoon/evening with an even(ish) mix of True Knowledge beta-testers and staff.

If you haven't done so already please help us spread the word by becoming a fan of the True Knowledge facebook page...

...and if you are coming on Saturday it would be great if you could mark yourself as attending on the (Facebook) event page.

If you don't use Facebook that's fine too; it would be fantastic if you could let me know in the comments if you're planning on coming on Saturday.

I am really looking forward to meeting members of the True Knowledge community in person.

Many thanks,

Nick Franklin (Community Manager)

My first week as a Knowledge Engineer

Hi! I'm David Palfrey, and as Beth says have just started (it's been a week now) at True Knowledge. Although I'd been fascinated by True Knowledge for a while, and had been a beta user, I hardly knew what to expect. I rather liked the sound of my job title, Junior Knowledge Engineer... it vaguely made me imagine I might be taking up my place in a vast and fabulous hierarchy of underlabouring mechanical elves, proudly trotting about their tasks as the cogs and gears ground around them to dispense verdicts upon what's known and knowable. 

Rather disappointingly, I've found that the True Knowledge employees are all full-sized human beings, and the only mechanical incident of my first week was the coffee machine going AWOL. Yet everyone here is very smart, enthusiastic and friendly, and there's clearly a load of knowledge engineering to be getting on with. I'm a pretty experienced and active wikipedia editor, and have been able to put some of that experience to practical use. But I've had to spend much of my time learning the ropes, being shown how to do things which (as a beta user) I'd largely left alone. As Beth says, True Knowledge is getting to know more about manufactured items at the moment, and I'm working to classify some of those.

Recent knowledge work

Our most productive user recently has been Ekaterin, who's adding things about the prehistorical periods.  Other users have been adding things as diverse as scarves and Maxwell's equations.  They were quick off the mark when the US election results came in too.  We had questions like Who won the US presidential election? working within minutes of the announcement, thanks to Equanimous.

We had another new knowledge engineer start this week.  David Palfrey has been a beta tester for us for months so it was great to convert him into an employee.  He's got started organising all our manufactured item ontology which will be really useful.

Something else we've been look at are n-ary facts.  Most of our facts are stored as a relationship between two objects, such as [bill gates] [is married to] [melinda gates].  Working with facts involving more objects is harder.  In theory we've got three ways of dealing with this but we've only needed to use two of them so far.  One method is to create complex objects which behave like simple ones but are in fact composed from several smaller ones.  For example, if you ask What is the distance between London and Paris? then the knowledge was represented by the fact x [is the distance between] [group: [london]; [paris]]. 

One of the problems with this is that the existing type checking isn't so useful, as it hasn't been type-checking the sub-objects in this type of compound.  We've decided how that's going to work now so it should go live later in the week.