Today I learned about the existence of the dbpedia project. It essentially turns Wikipedia into a very large database, enabling the information within it to be searched in more specific ways than usual.

I found out about the project through this recent arXiv paper about computational fact checking. They used dbpedia to make a set of triples along the lines of "Cats are mammals." I suspect their project could be useful for more than just fact-checking claims of reptilian cats. Perhaps it could be mashed up with something like this timeline project to have a constantly-updated set of facts most likely to need verifying today.