Google is building the largest storage of information in human history — a knowledge base that autonomously gathers and merges data from across the web to provide unprecedented access to all facts about the world.
The search giant is building Knowledge Vault, a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it. Google’s existing knowledge base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information.
Automation
However, humans could only take it so far so Google decided to automate the process and started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.
The vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date, of which 271 million are rated as “confident facts.” Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of these being true, New Scientist reported.
Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, said that the world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults. “Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they’re tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago,” he said.
