Announcing True Knowledge Local

(by William Tunstall-Pedoe)

One of the great things about True Knowledge is that it can answer questions on any topic. i.e. The system contains knowledge about everything that can be talked about or thought about, all integrated into a single platform.

However, this doesn't mean that vertical applications can't be built on it. They certainly can be, simply by comprehensively fleshing out the knowledge in a corner of the knowledge base.

One example of this is local product search. i.e. knowledge and common sense reasoning about where one can buy a particular product in a particular place. We have recently built this capability into our platform by adding lots of suitable knowledge and our early testing shows that this approach is substantially better for many searches than traditional keyword or statistical approaches to this problem.

Today we've opened an early beta of a web site that uses this capability (it uses our api).

It is a kind of local business and product search engine and is at:

http://local.trueknowledge.com/

To use it you simply enter any product or type of product and a place (we currently only have coverage of the UK) and the system uses its world knowledge and reasoning capabilties to generate a list of retailers where you should be able to buy this product.

The example below shows retailers where pillows can be purchased in Cambridge, England:

Some other examples:

Where to buy a bathtub in Edinburgh
Blinds in Glasgow
Buy tiles in Birmingham
Places to buy a hole punch in Nottingham
Where to buy cheddar in Cheddar

You can also use it to search for types of business in a place:
Japanese restaurants in Chinatown London
Pubs in the City of London
computer shops in Manchester, England

We still have lots more to do but the system is improving constantly as suitable knowledge is added to the platform.

If you wish to help, we'd love your input. Please enter some searches and give feedback via the Yes/No feedback links on the top right of the page.

We also have a dedicated discussion forum for this new site.