Online database company Freebase has taken $42 Million in a round that included Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs. Total funding to date is $57 million.

We first covered Freebase in March 2007 (see “This is cool, unless it achieves consciousness and kills us all“). Freebase is a massive database. The purpose of the database is to centralize as much data as possible, and allow participants to freely add and access data - developers can extract information from Freebase via a set of APIs and add it to their web applications. It also builds relationships between highly structured pieces of data, something that can’t easily be done with distributed data controlled by different entities.

I spoke at the bi-annual OECD conference in Istanbul last week. One of the big themes of the conference was what policies and products to use to fully leverage all of the official government economic, social and environmental data that flows into the organization. At the end of the conference the Istanbul Declaration was signed, calling for member countries to make their official governmental data available online as a public good.

Among various ideas under study, the OECD is thinking of creating an Internet site based on Web 2.0 “wiki” technologies for the presentation and discussion of international, national and local initiatives aimed at developing indicators of societal progress. By making indicators accessible to citizens all over the world through dynamic graphics and other analytical tools, this initiative would aim to stimulate discussion based on solid and comparable statistical information about what progress actually means.

Silicon Valley data visualization and modeling startup Swivel attended, as did other startups addressing these needs like IBM (see their Many Eyes data visualization product).

As a representative of the “new Internet,” I was definitely the black sheep of the conference. I was perhaps the only attendee not in a suit and tie (it was 100 degrees outside), and my Macbook Pro drew stares from this Windows-only mostly-government crowd. But they were genuinely interested in the evolution of the web and the open data approach to most new startups, and how to leverage that to get government data into the hands of economists and others as efficiently as possible.

Swivel has a huge head start in being the de-facto depository for official OECD data. The OECD is already an “offical source” on swivel via a deal done in the Spring, and hosts a lot of OECD data on its site already.

In addition to their official relationship with the OECD, Swivel does modeling in addition to the visualization tools offered by IBM and others gunning for the business (see our original post on Swivel during their beta). Freebase is another natural choice to deposit this kind of date. Whatever happens, the goal of distributing this kind of statistical data more broadly is a noble one. I hope it happens soon.

See Jesse Robbins’ coverage of the event as well over at O’Reilly Radar (he’s an advisor to Swivel and attended on their dime). My photos from the trip are here.

When Powerset announced plans to launch a new service called Powerlabs a week ago, it looked to be another sand box area for product previews, like those created by Microsoft, Google and others.But today Steve Newcomb, COO of Powerset, revealed a lot more about the project. I also saw an in person demo of Powerlabs today and some of the ideas behind it.

Powerlabs is more than a sandbox to show off new product ideas that aren’t ready for prime time. They are encouraging people interested in Powerset to sign up for Powerlabs and create what is effectively a profile. Once registered, users will be able to see new product ideas and vote on them, as well as submit their own ideas to the community. Later on, users will gain points and influence within the community.

In the demo today the company showed me one idea that they will be putting into Powerlabs once it launches - a mashup of Powerset natural language results along with video results, keyword results and, interestingly, Freeweb results (the two companies are working together). See the screen shot to the right (click for larger view).

Powerlabs hasn’t launched yet, but you can register for it via email on the Powerset home page. They are sending out regular communications to those users, including news at least an hour before its posted on the Powerset blog or given to press. In an email today, Powerset revealed that they have acquired another company, although they did not give any further details.

Freebase launches today, a new startup that intends to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. If that last bit sounds familiar, it’s because it’s actually Google’s mission, but Freebase seems intent on doing it, too.

Like Google Base, Freebase is a massive database. The purpose of the database is to centralize as much data as possible, and allow participants to freely add and access data - developers can extract information from Freebase via a set of APIs and add it to their web applications. It also builds relationships between highly structured pieces of data, something that can’t easily be done with distributed data controlled by different entities. Tim O’Reilly gives a great and in depth overview of the service and why it’s important. The Time’s John Markoff explains it to the masses.

O’Reilly says:

But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb [the company that created Freebase] is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.

Now, the really powerful thing about this is that all these categories, these data types and the web of fields that define them, provide new hooks for applications that will be able to extract meaning from the data. That’s what makes Metaweb a kind of semantic web application.

If Metaweb gets this right, this bottom up approach will build new connections between data, new categories and ways of thinking. It will likely be messy and contradictory for a while, but as I told John Markoff for the story on Metaweb that he was preparing for the New York Times tonight, they are building new synapses for the global brain.

Freebase has already sucked in data from Wikipedia and other sources, and individuals can fill in their own data, too. No word yet on how bad data will be purged from the system.

Freebase looks to be what Google Base is not: open and useful. I imagine there will be more than one forehead self-smacked at Google HQ tomorrow, as they think “We could have done this.”