Aaron Hillel Swartz

“ Well, we've been through a lot together, you and I. We've built up an application from its humble URLs to its high-falutin' notions of democracy. Along the way, we've made its world safe for robots, query systems, researchers, and Richard Stallman. But how do we get from this kind of website to the grand vision of the Semantic Web we've heard so much about?
Let's start by realizing that just being on the Web is an amazing thing. URLs provide a unified addressing scheme for any document—a pretty miraculous thing. ”

“ Just letting users take their data home with them is weak brew compared to sharing it with the wider world. (Picture a wide world of people at home with their weak data brew.) Which is why the Web invented APIs, letting us share the data with everyone who could think of a use for it. ”

“ Freebase is an enormous collaborative Web-editable RDF-like database, prepopulated with data extracted from Wikipedia and numerous other sources and supplemented with the contributions of various users. Freebase is still quite small, but their aims are ambitious—creating a database that combines numerous different sources and providing it as a backend to people who want to build more intelligent applications. ”