The 'Holy grail' in today's online world in order to enjoy the ultimate growth, power and revenues is indexing the available information and taking advantage of it by offering it in a structured way. Microsoft is planning achieving this goal with the "Fact Index" project.
Chris Anderson, a Senior Development Lead on the Live Search Developer team, is leading the Fact Index project, according to Anderson's LinkedIn profile. Anderson
describes the Fact Index as follows:
The fact index is Live Search's next generation platform for serving structured data. The goal of this team is simple: index every database in the world and expose it in a structured, strongly typed fashion. The first iteration of the fact index allows anyone with an XML feed (schema not required) and some sample queries to contribute to search relevance without even writing any code. Subsequent iterations will include querying across multiple data sources, aggregating, merging, and deduping data from multiple providers, and a host of other hard information retrieval problems.
Microsoft did not make any comment on the Fact Index project.