Knowledge in Probase is harnessed from digitized footprints of human behavior and communications.

But Probase is much more than a traditional ontology/taxonomy, which can be seen in three dimensions: the concept dimension, the data dimension, and the relationship dimension.

Compared with other knowledgebases, Probase is unique in two aspects. First, Probase has an extremely large concept/category space (2.7 million categories). As these concepts are automatically acquired from Web pages authored by millions of users, it is probably true that they cover most concepts in our mental world (about worldly facts). Second, data in Probase, as knowledge in our mind, is not black or white. Probase quantifies the uncertainty. These serve as the priors and likelihoods that become the foundations of probabilistic reasoning in Probase. With this probabilistic Probase, we build several interesting applications, such as topic search, Web table search and document understanding.

You can find all the information about the project at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/probase/

“As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. (…) Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups. The enterprise context is different however, and many of the elements that make social tagging work on the Web make it a challenge behind the firewall.

(…) A hybrid solution that employs social tagging and formal taxonomy as complementary information access approaches is emerging as a winning solution.

Organizations are interested in using social tagging technology both within workgroups and across the enterprise. Tagging can supplement information retrieval options in intranets and document management systems, allowing employees to use tags to enhance the findability of internal and external content without waiting for an information professional to categorize it.

(…) These all sound like great benefits, so why doesn’t every company implement social tagging? (…) The first major difference between the Web and the enterprise is nature of the content.

The first major difference between the Web and the enterprise is nature of the content. (…)

People are also different on the Web vs. the enterprise. (…)

Other issues that must be considered pertain to the quality of tags and tagging systems. (…)

Essentially, organizations should not be afraid to get involved in social tagging: it is a simple and inexpensive way to inject a little Web 2.0 into your employees’ lives and supplement more formal approaches to findability. (…)”

You can find the whole article here: http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-social-tagging-and-enterprise-does-tagging-work-work.html