Google’s ‘Knowledge Vault’ Builds A Massive Data Bank

Google is developing what News Scientist has referred to as “the largest store of knowledge in human history”, and the company is doing so without any human editorial involvement. Google’s “Knowledge Vault” autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into a single base of facts about the world, and the people and objects within it.

The implications for third-party publishers could be massive over time, as Google relies less and less on them. Google has reportedly assembled 1.6 billion “facts” and scored them according to the company’s confidence in their accuracy. Approximately 16 percent of the database information currently qualifies as “confident facts.”

As Knowledge Vault grows, and Google’s confidence in it increases over time, it is expected that it will be used in a variety of contexts, especially in mobile. Industry experts are buzzing with the future potential of this data, considering all sorts of new applications and computing scenarios that could be created. The New Scientist article suggests that Knowledge Vault could be the basis for future artificial intelligence applications, machine-to-machine communications, augmented reality, predictive models and virtual assistant use cases. “Other agents will carry out the same process to watch over and guide our health, sorting through a knowledge base of medical symptoms to find correlations with data in each person’s health records,” wrote New Scientist. “IBM’s Watson is already doing this for cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York.”

Some security experts see the potential for negative implications in Google’s Knowledge Vault, with concerns about an extension of the U.S. government’s “total information awareness” program. As with any gathering of data, the way that the information is used is key, and the details of this reality are yet to be seen. However, one thing that industry analysts appear to agree on is the astounding task that Google is taking on with this initiative.

“It’s a hugely impressive thing that they are pulling off,” said Fabian Suchanek, a data scientist at Telecom ParisTech in France.

Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, stated that they world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar data 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,” said Austin. “Before this decade is out, we will have a smart priority inbox that will find for us the 10 most important emails we’ve received and handle the rest without us having to touch them.”

Will our future include personal virtual assistants who will handle much of our communication on our behalf without the need for our intervention? This is a lofty statement, but may not be as far out of reach as some might think. “Behind the scenes, Google doesn’t only have public data,” said Suchanek. “It can also pull in information from Gmail, Google+ and YouTube. You and I are stored in the Knowledge Vault in the same way as Elvis Presley.”