The semantic web has been much ballyhooed in recent years as a way of bringing structured meaning to the web; however, anyone who has spent time trying to encode this meaning (via OWL/RDF for example) can find that simply applying an ontology is challenging, much less developing or extending one to fit your needs. I'd be interested in hearing if you believe that freebase.com (or other approaches) help reduce the complexity of generating/applying an ontology, or if the focus is geared more towards the consumption of the encoded data?

Hey. First, I have to agree with Ian, my experiences with semantic web have been not too positive (a lot of overhead). But: do you have a plan for the future? If so, please upload it so we can give feedback…