Omnibase: Uniform Access to Heterogeneous Data for Question Answering

Although the World Wide Web contains a tremendous amount of information, the lack of uniform structure makes finding the right knowledge difficult. A solution is to turn the Web into a "virtual database" and to access it through natural language. We built Omnibase, a system that integrates heterogeneous data sources using an object-property-value model. With the help of Omnibase, our START natural language system can now access numerous heterogeneous data sources on the Web in a uniform manner, and answers millions of user questions with high precision.

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